Poor Hannah was destined to find it so. She was received with cold looks; her petition, so carefully worded and drawn up, was scarcely looked at before the King flung it down, and threw a curt heartless refusal at her.
She was hurried away by the attendants, who, though commiserating her grief and innocence, felt that she only ran a needless risk of drawing down the royal wrath upon herself.
"You are a brave lady," said Lord Churchill, himself bowing her out of the King's suite of apartments. "My heartiest sympathy goes with you. A man with so brave a sister will surely go bravely to his death. And there will come a time when that is all that the best of us can ask to do."
Churchill spoke the truth; the brave brother of a brave sister met his death with unshrinking fortitude, cheered to the last by the presence of Hannah, and by her sisterly love and care.
No thought of personal fatigue or personal peril sufficed to prevent her returning instantly to Taunton, and the last days of Benjamin's short life were rendered almost happy to him by his reunion with his twin sister, and by their constant intercourse.
Money could purchase this boon, though it could not purchase the prisoner's life.
He suffered upon the scaffold with so many others as little guilty as he of doing wrong, albeit something rash and ill-advised, and when Hannah had obtained with trouble and much cost the right to take his body and bury it, as in the case of William, she had only to return home to tell her mother the terrible and mournful tale.
"But thy courage sweetened death for them both, my child," said the mother. "In days to come that will be a thought that will bring to thee the comfort thou canst not feel yet."
"I never felt brave," Hannah would answer simply, when her friends praised her. "I only did what I had to do. I could not help myself."