bloodhounds, chained in the courtyard from sunrise to sunset; and it
sank to a wail, and the wail broke to a howl, dismal, ear-rending,
wild. Before it had died away, one of the Saxon bondwomen shrieked
aloud, and the next took up the cry, and then another, as a likewake
dirge, till every stone in the shadowy manor seemed to have a voice,
and every voice was weeping for the dead lord. And many of the women
fell upon their knees, and some of the men, too, while others drew up
their hoods, and stood with bent heads and folded hands against the
rough walls.

Slowly and solemnly they bore him in and set the bier down under the
mid-arch. Then Gilbert Warde looked up and faced his mother; but he
stood aside, that she might see her husband; and the monks and song-
boys stood back also, with their wax torches, which cast a dancing
glare through the dim twilight. Gilbert's face was white and stern; but
the Lady Goda was pale, too, and her heart fluttered, for she had to
play the last act of her married life before many who would watch her
narrowly. For one moment she hesitated whether to scream or to faint in
honour of her dead husband. Then, with the instinct of the born and
perfect actress, she looked wildly from her son's face to the straight,
still length that lay beneath the pall. She raised one hand to her
forehead, pressing back her golden hair with a gesture half mad, half
dazed, then seemed to stagger forward two steps, and fell upon the
body, in a storm of tears.

Gilbert went to the bier, and lifted one of his mother's gloved hands
from the covered face, and it dropped from his fingers as if lifeless.
He lifted the black cloth pall, and turned it back as far as he could
without disturbing the woman's prostrate figure; and there lay the Lord
of Stoke, in his mail, as he had fallen in fight, in his peaked steel