A dull November day, with, rolling in from the Channel, great masses of sea fog, damp and wet, that made the dogs in the street creep closer to the house doors for shelter and warmth, and the swine in the streets to huddle themselves together for greater comfort. A day on which those who had no call to be out of doors warmed themselves over fires, or gathered round tavern tables and drank drams of nantz and usquebaugh; a day which no man would care to think should resemble the day on which he would himself be put away into the earth for ever. But the melancholy of the elements and the weather were the only part of the wretched funeral of this man for which he had not been responsible. The gloom and the fog and the damp he could not help, since none, whether king or pauper, can fix the date of their death, or choose to die and go to their last home amidst the shining of the sun and the singing of the birds and the blooming of the flowers, in preference to the miseries of the winter. But all else he might have avoided had he so chosen.

For he might have been borne--not to a beggar's grave, but to the tomb of his own illustrious family in England--amidst pomp and honour had he so willed it; the pomp and honour of a Marquis's heir, the pomp and honour of a gallant officer who had fought under the greatest general that England had ever known, and for his mourners he might have had a loving wife and child weeping for his loss.

Only he would not, and so there was not one that day to shed a tear for him.

[CHAPTER II]

AN UNPEACEFUL PASSING

So the funeral passed over Essex Bridge and by the French Church, on the steps of which there sat a boy who, on its approach, sprang to his feet and, from behind a pillar of the porch, fixed his eyes firmly on those who attended it.

A boy of between fifteen and sixteen years of age, tall and, thus, looking older, and clad partly in rags and partly in clothes too big for him. To be explicit, his hose was torn and mended and torn again, his shoes were burst and broken and his coat which, though threadbare was sound, hung down nearly to his feet and was roomy enough for a man of twenty, to whom indeed it had once belonged till given in charity to its present owner. By the boy's side there stood a big, burly man with a red, kindly face and a great fell of brown hair, himself dressed in the garb of a butcher, and with at the moment, as though he had but just left the block, his sharpening steel hanging at his side. Also, on the steps of the church were one or two gentlemen arrayed in their college gowns and caps, as if they too had strolled forth at the moment from Trinity and had happened upon the spot, while, around and under the stoops of the neighbouring houses, were gathered together several groups of beggars and ragamuffins and idle ne'er-do-wells.

And now you shall hear a strange thing, for, as the bier with its mean burden came close, so that the features of those who accompanied it might be plainly perceived through the fog, the butcher, turning to the lad dressed as a scarecrow, said, "My lord, stand forth and show thyself. Here come those who have put it about that you have been dead these two years, and who, if they had their will, would soon have you dead now. Show thyself therefore, I say, Lord St. Amande, and prove that thou art alive."

"Ay, ay, do," one of the collegians added. "If the news from London be true, thy uncle, Robert, has already proclaimed himself the new lord, and it is as well that the contrary should be proved."

Thus solemnly adjured, the boy did stand forth and, figure of fun though he looked, gazed fiercely on those who rode behind his father's coffin.