Throughout the night she watched by her patient’s bedside, but as day dawned she left it for a moment to call the Chaplain to come quickly, he having remained in the house that he might be at hand if need should be, in accordance with his patron’s wishes.

“’Tis over, and she is dying,” said the good woman.  “I fear she hath not her wits, poor soul.  All night she hath cried one name, and lies and moans it still.”

Mr. Fox followed her into a little cleanly, raftered chamber.  He knelt by the bedside and spoke gently to the girl who lay upon the white pillows, her deathly face more white than the clean, coarse linen.  ’Twas true she did not see him, but lay staring at the wall’s bareness, her lips moving as she muttered the name she had shrieked and wailed at intervals throughout the hours.  “John—­Oh, John Oxon!” he could barely hear, “God laughs at us—­why should not such as thou?”

And when the sun rose she lay stiff and dead, with a dead child in her rigid arm; and Mr. Fox rode slowly back with a grave countenance, to join his lord and patron at the village inn, and tell him all was over.

CHAPTER XI

“It Might Have Been—­It Might Have Been!”

The heavenly summer weeks he passed with his beloved parents at Camylott before they set forth on their journey to the Continent remained a sweet memory in the mind of the young Marquess so long as he lived, and was cherished by him most tenderly.  In those lovely June days he spent his hours with his father and mother as he had spent them as a child, and in that greater intimacy and closer communion which comes to a son with riper years, if the situation is not reversed and his maturity has not drifted away from such fondness.  Both the Duke and Duchess were filled with such noble pride in him and he with such noble love of them.  All they had hoped for in him he had given them, all his manly heart longed for they bestowed upon him—­tenderness, companionship, sympathy in all he did or dreamed of doing.

After his leave of absence it was his intention to rejoin his Grace of Marlborough on the Continent for a period, since his great friend had so desired, but later he would return and give up his career of arms to devote himself to the interests of his country in other ways, and of this his mother was particularly glad, feeling all a woman’s fears for his safety and all her soft dread of the horrors of war.

“I would not have shown you my heart when you went away from England, Gerald,” she said. “’Twould not have been brave and just to do so since ’twas your desire to go.  But no woman’s heart can lie light in her breast when her son is in peril every hour—­and I could not bear to think,” her violet eyes growing softly dark, “that my son in winning glory might rob other mothers of their joy.”