"Aye," replied the Bishop, looking with kindly eyes upon Mora's old nurse. "Within two hours, he should be here."
"Comes he alone, my lord?" asked Mistress Deborah.
"Nay," replied the Bishop, "the Countess of Norelle, a very noble lady to whom the Knight is betrothed, rides hither with him."
"The saints be praised!" exclaimed the old woman, and turned away to hide her tears.
Whilst his body-servant prepared a bath and laid out his robes, the Bishop mounted to the ramparts and watched the gold fade in the west. He glanced at the river below, threading its way through the pasture land; at the billowy masses of trees; at the gay parterre, bright with summer flowers. Then he looked long in the direction of the city from which he had come.
During his strenuous ride, the slow tramp of the men-at-arms, had sounded continually in his ears; the outline of that helpless figure, lying at full length upon the stretcher, had been ever before his eyes.
He could not picture the arrival at the hostel, the removal of the covering, the uprising of the Prioress to face life anew, enfolded in the arms of her lover.
As in a weary dream, in which the mind can make no headway, but returns again and yet again to the point of distress, so, during the entire ride, the Bishop had followed that stretcher through the streets of Worcester city, until it seemed to him as if, before the pall was lifted, the long-limbed, graceful form beneath it would have stiffened in death.
"A corpse for a bride! A corpse for a bride!" the hoofs of the black mare Shulamite had seemed to beat out upon the road. "Alas, poor Knight! A corpse for a bride!"
The Bishop came down from the battlements.