ONE:As the summer wore on she grew steadily worse. She lay stiff and helpless, through the long August days, watching the sunlight creep up the wall, slip along the ceiling, and then vanish into the pale, heat-washed sky that gleamed with it even after the stars had come. She did not fret much, or think muchshe watched things. She watched the sunshine from its red kindling to its red scattering, she watched the moon slide across the window, and haunt the mirror after it had passedor the sign of the Scales dangling in the black sky. Sometimes the things she looked at seemed to fade, and she would see a room in which she and her husband were sitting or a lane along which they were walking ...[Pg 201] but just as she had begun to wonder whether she were not really still young and happy and married and this vision the fact and the sickness and loneliness the dream, then suddenly everything would pass away like smoke, and she would be back in her bed, watching the travelling sun, or the haunting moon, or the hanging stars."My Lord De Boteler, boy or man, Wat Turner was never a knave, and"
TWO:"Tell his poor girl he died wudout suffering."The next morning he repaired again to Westminster. The hall of the palace was open for all who chose to enter, and in the midst, elevated on three circular marble steps, was a hollow marble pillar, surmounted by a large gilt eagle, from beneath whose talons flowed wine into four marble basins, of which all who entered were permitted to drink at pleasure. But the monk was no wine-drinker; and with the feelings of one unaccustomed to behold extravagance, he turned away from the pillar with an inward reproach to the donor, for not applying the money to a better purpose. He left the hall, and seeing that a path was found from the gate of the palace to the north-west entrance of the abbey, by a slightly elevated platform, covered with fine crimson cloth of tapestry, he naturally concluded that the king would pass that way to hear mass, and accordingly took his stand as near as possible to the platform. Inexperienced as the monk was in the etiquette of courts, he augured ill for his suit when he saw the royal retainers, with all the insolence of office, range themselves along the platform, and the nobles and their pages, and the officers of the royal household in their splendid dresses issue from the palace. But when he beheld the young king himself, with Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, on his right hand, and the Bishop of London on his left, he started back with an exclamation of surprise (for wrapped up in himself, and heedless of the passing gossip of the day, he had not heard of Sudbury's elevation); and forcing a passage through the assembled crowd, hopeless and despondent, he pursued his journey eastward.
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