"You are right, madam," I said sombrely. "For me to-day there is no God in heaven."
"Yet the morrow cometh," she replied confidently. "It has come for me. My mind goes back to the time when the evil began that our glorious Prince is now uprooting. In eighty-eight, when I was a maid of some twenty Junes, not uncomely as I remember myself in my mirror, though not comparable with your sweet and splendid mistress, we, then the ancient Hardys of Hardywick, gave our all and lost our all for the cause. Yon scutcheon then hung in a noble hall. I have looked at it with pride and, God be thanked, without regret, during nearly sixty years of loneliness and poverty, but I shall die rich and friended in the possession of this."
She lifted the brooch to her lips and kissed it, and then, poor soul, broke into a fit of coughing that racked her thin frame. A comely serving-woman rushed in to her aid, and together we seated her near the fire and wrapped a shawl around her. She seemed as one who slept with half-shut eyes and dreamed.
"She's of'n tuk like this'n," whispered her woman. "As lively as a lass at a wedding for an hour maybe, and then dreamy and dead-like for hours at a stretch. She's seventy-six come June, but I dunna think she'll live to see it, and to be sure, God bless her, I shall be glad to see her broken heart at rest."
She put a smelling-bottle to her mistress's nose, and bathed the white lips with eau-de-Luce.
"I love her no end," she said simply.
It was time to go. I dropped on my knee and kissed the fair, thin, wrinkled hand. At the touch of my lips she spoke again:
"Good-bye, Harold, my beloved! The God of all good causes go with thee!"
She was back in the long-ago with her lover at her knee, sending him off to fight for the cause, and the ringless finger showed that he had never come back.
I stole out of the room with a mist in my eyes.