Reserve and reticence were not in the nature of Roger Mortimer. The Princess very soon perceived, with equal amusement and delight, the fulfilment of her prophecy; and urged upon her royal son the desirability of at once betrothing Roger and Alianora. The King, however, preferred a little delay. There was time enough, he said: both were yet very young; matters might alter before they were old enough to be married. So the formal ceremony, though fully intended, was deferred, leaving an element of uncertainty which added to Roger’s intermittent misery. The autumn which followed the spring of Roger’s transference to Woking witnessed some most painful events. The second son of the Princess, Sir John de Holand, entering into a squabble between his attendants out of which he had far better have kept himself, killed Sir Ralph Stafford, the favourite squire of the young Queen. He was condemned to die, and the Princess in an agony of grief, sent Sir Lewis Clifford to the King at York, earnestly beseeching for mercy to his brother. She was refused, and it was the first refusal which her royal son had ever given to an intercession of hers. As the event proved, he was ready enough to grant it as man, but he could not feel it his duty as King. The Princess laid it so to heart that her heart broke. A fortnight after the return of Sir Lewis from his fruitless errand, she lay dead at Wallingford Castle. In the first impulse of his anguish and remorse, King Richard granted a full pardon to his brother, on condition of his making a pilgrimage to Syria. He was a man of the deepest affections, and next to his wife, his mother had been nearest to his heart. Perhaps it was the remembrance of this one rejected appeal and the agony of its result, which made Richard in after years so perpetual a pardoner of the transgressions of those whom he loved. Another result of these sorrowful circumstances was to cause the King to carry into immediate action various intentions which he knew had been his mother’s wish. And in pursuance of one of these, on a morning in October, he sent for the Earl of March. The royal officers conducted Roger, somewhat to his surprise, to the King’s private closet, and motioned to his suite to remain in the ante-chamber. He was to pass in alone. Roger found, however, that the interview was not to be _tête-à-tête_. Seated in a curule chair by the side of His Majesty was the uncle of both, Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, the most astute man in England, and the evil angel of the King. Roger made his reverences to his royal kinsman, and was directed to seat himself on a velvet settle which faced them. A slight motion from the young King appeared to be a preconcerted signal at which Gloucester took up the word. [Illustration: ’Roger made his reverences to his royal kinsman, and was directed to seat himself on a velvet settle which faced them.’]