‘He must have been a very holy man,’ said Alice, ’and strict withal.  Who was he?’

’One Father Thomas, a Canon Regular of the chapter of St. Agnes, a very saint, who spends his life in copying and illuminating the Holy Scripture, and in writing holy thoughts that verily seem to have been breathed into him by special inspiration of God.  It was a sermon of his in Lent, upon chastening and perplexity, that I heard when first I was snatched from Dijon, that made me never rest till I had obtained his ghostly counsel.  If I never meet him again, I shall thank Heaven for those months at Zwoll all my life—­ere the Duke of Burgundy made my Countess resign Holland for twelve years to her uncle, and we left the place.  Then, well-nigh against her will, they forced her into a marriage with the Duke of Brabant, though he be her first cousin, her godson, and a mere rude boy.  I cannot tell you how evil were the days we often had then.  If he had been left to himself, Madame might have guided him; but ill men came about him; they maddened him with wine and beer; they excited him to show that he feared her not; he struck her, and more than once almost put her in danger of her life.  Then, too, his mother married the Bishop of Liege, her enemy—­

‘The Bishop!’

’He had never been consecrated, and had a dispensation.  That marriage deprived my poor lady of even her mother’s help.  All were against her then; and for me too it went ill, for the Duke of Burgundy insisted on my being given to a half-brother of his, one they call Sir Boemond of Burgundy—­a hard man of blood and revelry.  The Duke of Brabant was all for him, and so was the Duchess-mother; and though my uncles would not have chosen him, yet they durst not withstand the Duke of Burgundy.  I tried to appeal to the Emperor Sigismund, the head of our house, but I know not if he ever heard of my petition.  I was in an exceeding strait, and had only one trust, namely, that Father Thomas had told me that the more I threw myself upon God, the more He would save me from man.  But oh! they seemed all closing in on me, and I knew that Sir Boemond had sworn that I should pay heavily for my resistance.  Then one night my Countess came to me.  She showed me the bruises her lord had left on her arms, and told me that he was about to banish all of us, her ladies, into Holland, and to keep her alone to bear his fury, and she was resolved to escape, and would I come with her?  It seemed to me the message of deliverance.  Her nurse brought us peasant dresses, high stiff caps, black boddices, petticoats of many colours, and therein we dressed ourselves, and stole out, ere dawn, to a church, where we knelt till the Sieur d’Escaillon—­the gentleman who attends Madame still—­drove up in a farmer’s garb, with a market cart, and so forth from Bruges we drove.  We cause to Valenciennes, to her mother; but we found that she, by persuasion of the Duke, would give us both up; so the Sieur d’Escaillon got together sixty lances, and therewith we rode to Calais, where never were weary travellers more courteously received than we by Lord Northumberland, the captain of Calais.’