We soon reached her house or, rather, cottage, which was in a street behind the west side of the square. She was too tottery, too dazzled, too afflated to speak on the way thither, but, at the door, when with a bow I was intending to leave her, she bade me, in a madam-like way that cut off debate or refusal, to enter with her. Plain to the casual eye, it was the home of decayed gentility. Here would be refined eating of a dinner of herbs, solaced by talk of prideful yesterdays. You saw it in the few things that still kept their grip on the past: on the wall an old, black painting of a knight in ruff and quilted doubtlet; a pounce-box and a hawking-glove on the chimney-piece, and above it an oval scutcheon, with a golden eagle _naissant_ from a _fesse vert_. And hope was ever new-born here, but it was the hope centred in the Virgin-Mother, posed in ivory over a wooden _prie-Dieu_. Nor did I feel that I had shifted from my familiar moorings as I bowed my head when she knelt in prayer. "Madam," said I, when, with a happy face, she rose and turned and thanked me, "it is in your power to do me a great kindness." "I shall, then, most surely do it." "I ask you to pray for the soul of John Dobson." "He was your friend?" she said gently. "My friend from boyhood, madam, and this morning I slew him." There was silence for a space. Then she said, "I will pray daily for the soul of your friend, and for you that God will have mercy upon you and give you peace. We women, who can only pray, do not, I fear, realize how, for our men, the facts of life seem to make havoc of our creeds." "You are right, madam," I said sombrely. "For me to-day there is no God in heaven." "Yet the morrow cometh," she replied confidently. "It has come for me. My mind goes back to the time when the evil began that our glorious Prince is now uprooting. In eighty-eight, when I was a maid of some twenty Junes, not uncomely as I remember myself in my mirror, though not comparable with your sweet and splendid mistress, we, then the ancient Hardys of Hardywick, gave our all and lost our all for the cause. Yon scutcheon then hung in a noble hall. I have looked at it with pride and, God be thanked, without regret, during nearly sixty years of loneliness and poverty, but I shall die rich and friended in the possession of this." She lifted the brooch to her lips and kissed it, and then, poor soul, broke into a fit of coughing that racked her thin frame. A comely serving-woman rushed in to her aid, and together we seated her near the fire and wrapped a shawl around her. She seemed as one who slept with half-shut eyes and dreamed. "She's of'n tuk like this'n," whispered her woman. "As lively as a lass at a wedding for an hour maybe, and then dreamy and dead-like for hours at a stretch. She's seventy-six come June, but I dunna think she'll live to see it, and to be sure, God bless her, I shall be glad to see her broken heart at rest."