The ladies told Lancelot that the queen had said,—
"Hither cometh Lancelot as fast as he may to fetch my corpse. But I beseech Almighty God that I may never behold him again with my mortal eyes."
This, said the ladies, was her prayer for two days, till she died. When Lancelot looked upon her dead face he wept not greatly, but sighed. And he said all the service for the dead himself, and in the morning he sang mass.
Then was the corpse placed in a horse-bier, and so taken to Glastonbury with a hundred torches ever burning about it, and Lancelot and his fellows on foot beside it, singing and reading many a holy orison, and burning frankincense about the corpse.
When the chapel had been reached, and services said by the hermit archbishop, the queen's corpse was wrapped in cered cloth of Raines, thirty-fold, and afterwards was put in a web of lead, and then in a coffin of marble.
But when the corpse of her whom he had so long loved was put in the earth, Lancelot swooned with grief, and lay long like one dead, till the hermit came and aroused him, and said,—
"You are to blame for such unmeasured grief. You displease God thereby."
Copyright by F. Frith and Co. Ltd., London, England.
THE OLD KITCHEN OF GLASTONBURY ABBEY.