pretty eyes were closed, and the curling lashes scorched to the skin; her pure neck was blackened and blistered; and, a mass of pain and sore, she lay like a dead thing, but for the wailing moans which shewed her sad title yet to a ruined existence.  Alas for her that she did not die!  Wo, that life was so strong in her now, when, blemished and disfigured for ever, she might not hold its honours or taste its joys!—­now, when she must endure a worse thing than death for the sake of her family name!  ‘Therefore,’ says the chronicle, ’she was in a manner loathed of her parents, and kept forth secretly from the common knowledge of the people.’

‘The house of Poole must have no charred mummy for its heiress,’ said old Dame Katharine; and Sir Mighell and his lady bowed their heads and acquiesced.

It was agreed, then, that she should be sent to a house of ’close nuns,’ to be made a woman of religion, and so kept out of the sight of all men’s eyes.  With this view, she was brought up; taught nothing else; suffered to hope for nothing else; suffered to speak of nothing else.  But they could not bind her thoughts; and by a strange perversity of will, these went always to the open fields and the unfettered limb, to the vague picturing of freedom, and the dreamy forecast of love.  Yet she kept her peace; not daring to tell her mind to any, and nourishing all the more strongly, because in silence, the characteristics which destroyed the charm of a conventual life.  When she came to the years of discretion, she was to be professed; but, in accordance with an old custom, before her profession she required to enter the world for a season, that her ‘vocation’ might be judged of, whether it were true or not, or simply the effect of education on the one hand, and of ignorance on the other; and thus, when she was fifteen years of age, she was dismissed to her father’s house for the space of six months’ nominal trial, after which time she must return to the convent for ever.

Now, Dame Katharine a Poole, Jane’s paternal grandmother, was a fierce, proud old woman, whose heart was set on the creation of her son’s house, and whose very virtue was her family pride.  When she heard of Jane’s return to the outer world of men, she hastily rode over to see this ugly, despised thing, and to take her from her father’s castle to the grim quiet of her own dungeon-like home, if so be that she was as unlovely as report had spoken her.  They met; and for a moment the proud old dame was struck as by death.  The seamed and scarred face, the closed eyes—­one perfectly sightless, the other well-nigh so—­the burnt and withered hair growing in long, ragged patches only, the awkward gait and downcast look; all were like daggers in Dame Katharine’s heart; and ’she rebuked her greatly, seeing that she was too loathly for any gentleman who was equal to her in birth.’