"Speak the worst, Bertram Lyngern!" cried the old lady. "Thy Lord--" It seemed to Bertram as if the only words that would come to his lips in reply were two lines of an inscription set up in many a church, and as familiar to all present as any hackneyed proverb to us. "`_Pur ta pite, Jesu, regarde, Et met cest alme en sauve garde_.'" There was an instant's dead silence. It was broken by the mother's cry of anguish-- "Tom, Tom! My lad, my last lad!" "Drowned, Master Lyngern?" asked a score of voices. Bertram tacitly ignored the question. He walked languidly up the hall, and dropping on one knee before the Princess, presented to her a sapphire signet-ring--the last token sent by her dead husband. Constance took it mechanically; and Bertram, going back to his usual seat, filled a goblet with Gascon wine, and drank it like a man who was faint and exhausted. "Sit, Master Lyngern, and rest you," pursued the Dowager; "but when you be refreshed, give us to wit the rest." The tone of her voice seemed to say that the worst which could come, had come; and the dreadful fact known, the details mattered little. Bertram attempted to eat, but almost immediately he pushed away his trencher, and regardless of etiquette, laid his forehead upon his arm on the table. "I cannot eat! And how shall I speak what I must say? I would have died for him." Then, suddenly lifting his head, he spoke quickly, as if he wished to come at once to the end of his miserable task. "Noble ladies, my Lord of Salisbury is beheaden of the rabble at Cirencester, and my Lord of Exeter at Pleshy; and men say that Lord Richard the King lieth dead at Pomfret, and that God wot how." Constance spoke at last, but in a voice not like her own. "God doom Henry of Bolingbroke!" The words, if repeated, might have doomed her; but she feared no man. That evening, Bertram told the details of that woeful story.