Poor Jane bore all these coarse reproaches with much outward meekness; but the spirit which they woke up in her was little interpreted by the drooping head and tearful eyes.  A fiery demon, breathing rage and vowing revenge, took such meek-seeming as this, and blinded the old grandam to the mischief she was working, until it was too late to repair it.  Dame Katharine took the girl home; Sir Mighell and his wife consenting in gratitude to be so well delivered from such a heavy burden.  Dame Elizabeth, the girl’s mother, truly shed a few tears, quickly dried; and so young Jane parted for ever from her father’s house.

Like a dead thing, revived by the fresh winds of heaven, Jane’s comparative freedom aroused in her the most passionate abhorrence of the life to which she was destined, and the most passionate desire for liberty and affection.  With each breath she drew by the open casement, with each glance cast into the depths of the dark woods beyond, rose up the strong instincts of her age, and turned her for ever from the convent gate.  In vain the dame insisted; Jane stood firm; and declared that she would still refuse, at the very altar, to take the vow.  Yet was she timid in all things but those of love and liberty; and Dame Katharine, by violence and threats, so worked on her fears, that she at last consented, amid grievous tears and bitter reproaches, to be deprived of her name and state, and given forth to the castle people as a poor gentlewoman, godchild to the dame.

‘Anything for freedom!’ sighed Jane, as she took the oath of secrecy.  ‘Any deprivation rather than that living tomb of the nun!’

It was now the dame’s chief care to be rid of her charge.  She cast about for suitors, but even the lowest squire shook his head at the offer.  At last, she married her grandchild to the son of an honest yeoman of Suffolk, and so sent her forth to take her place in the world as the wife of a common peasant, and the mother of a family of peasants.  Such was the fate allotted to Jane a Poole, daughter of the proud Earl of Suffolk!

Of her issue, we need say but little.  Suffice it to know, that Jane and her ploughman William had four children, three sons and one daughter; of whom William, the second son, married an honest man’s daughter, whose name was Alice Gryse, and whose children were living in 1490, when this chronicle was written.

Return we now to the puissant lord, Sir Mighell, Earl of Suffolk.  He was not long suffered to enjoy his home; indeed, so ardent a soul as his would have eaten its way through his castle walls, as a chrysalis through its silken tomb, if he had been long inactive.  If war had not been his duty, he must have made it his crime; if foreign foes had not called upon his valour, too surely would domestic friends have suffered from his disloyalty.  Born for the fight, he would have fulfilled his destiny by force if he might not by right.  At the battle of Agincourt (1415), he perished along with many other of England’s nobles.