"'I have come,' Lancelot said, 'to take you from this place. The King is gone from us now, and we shall never see him in this world again. Come with me now to my own city. While the King was with us I did not care whether I had a city. I thought it grander and nobler to be his knight than to be King of all the world but England. You know, my Queen, that I am King of Benwick. Come with me now and be my Queen still, more my Queen than ever, the Queen of Benwick. It is a little place, but my people love me, and they will love you, too.'
"'Lancelot,' said the Queen, 'we must not think of such things—I must not. You must go back and rule your people well and make them happy—yes, and be happy yourself, if you can—but I must stay here and try to do a little good to the poor, and fast and pray, so that God will forgive me and so that he will forgive you and let us see our Arthur in another world, since we cannot in this. For, Lancelot, do you know that it is because of us—because of me and of you—that our Arthur has gone from us?'
"'No, no,' said Lancelot, 'it is not true. I will not let you say such things of yourself, even though you say them of me. We did nothing that was wrong, you and I. They charged us with some plot—I do not know what it was, and they did not know themselves. Then I saved you and I saved myself, as it was right that I should do. The King made war on me. I made no war on him. I only guarded my knights and my people. I would not even have fought with Gawain, only he would have it so. And when I heard that the King needed me here in England I came back to help him, and it was too late. But it was the traitors who brought all this death and ruin.'
"'It was not that we did any wrong, Lancelot,' said the Queen, 'it was that we did not do all that was right. You would rather be Arthur's knight, you said, than to be King of all the world but England. Ah, yes, but what of England? Did you never wish, even in your heart, that you were King of that? Arthur had noble thoughts for the good of his country and of his people, and you swore to be faithful in everything to him and to help him. And so your thoughts, Lancelot, should have been all for the King and for his people, and so should mine. And were they so? Did you never forget these things and work and fight for your own name and your own glory, instead of for the glory of the King and for the good of England? You fought, too, many times, for my name and for my glory, and I was foolish and let you do it, when my thoughts, too, should have been all for him and for England. But here alone, since we were all parted, I have had time to think, and I have seen more clearly than I ever saw before. Lancelot, it is not the great sins of the wicked people that bring ruin to the world; it is the follies and the failings of those who should be most true and most faithful, and so help and save the world, but do not do it. We were the nearest to the King, I his Queen and you his greatest knight. We should have been as strong and as firm in our faithfulness to him as he was to himself. If we ever had selfish and vain thoughts, thoughts that were not for the King, for a single hour, it was a worse wrong in us than the wrongs that those poor, weak knights did when they let Mordred persuade them and lead them against the King. Do you not know why you could not see the Holy Grail, as Galahad and Percivale and Bors saw it? This was why. And they could see it because in every thought and wish they were true to what they and all of the Round Table swore to the King. And so, Lancelot, my own best knight, as there is work for you to do among your people, go and do it, but I must stay here and do a little good, if I can, and pray for you and for myself, so that some time we may be nearer to the King than we have ever been.'
"'If you are right,' said Lancelot, 'and you must be right—if you are right in staying here and doing what you say that you will do, then it is right for me, too. I will not go back to France. I will find some peaceful place and some good man, some hermit perhaps, and ask him to let me stay with him and do as you are doing. Pray for me sometimes, my Queen, and I will pray for you always.'
"Now I can guess just what you think of all this. You think that Lancelot had not done any wrong at all and that the Queen was a great deal too hard on him. But I know that the Queen was right. Think over all that she said again and you will know it too. The Queen and Lancelot had stood next to the King for all these years. They had been proud of him and proud that they were so near to him, and if they had been steadfast in all that they did and said and thought, nothing could ever have harmed him or his country while they all lived. But sometimes they were weak and thoughtless, and then the King was left to work alone. Though this was all that they had done amiss, it was enough.
"So Lancelot left the Queen and went on his way. And Guinevere stayed there at Almesbury and lived with the nuns. She never left the abbey except to walk a little way among the fields, in the woods, and along the river that we saw when we were at Amesbury, or, more often, to carry help or comfort to the poor or the sick.
"After she had been with the nuns for a time she became one of them, and no one among them worked more than she for the people near who needed help, and no one among them was loved more than she. And no one, even of those who knew her best, could tell whether she was happy. But they all knew that she was always gentle and patient, that she never said that her work was hard, that she never seemed to wish for her old life, and that the sick people watched for her and the poor people prayed for her. And when the old abbess died they were all sure that no one could take her place so well as Guinevere. And so, for what was left of her life, Guinevere was abbess at Almesbury.
"When Lancelot rode away from Almesbury he felt that it was nothing to him where he went. He felt that he hated courts and tournaments and battle-fields now, and he wished only to find some place away from the busy and noisy world, where he could live as the Queen was living. And so he wandered here to Glastonbury. And when he found Bedivere here, when Bedivere had told him all about the great battle, and when he had shown him the grave in the chapel where he believed that King Arthur was buried, then Lancelot begged the abbot to let him stay here and be a monk with the rest of them as long as he lived. And the abbot and Bedivere were both glad to have him stay. So Lancelot, too, lived his life among his brother monks and among the poor and the sick, and they all learned to love him, as, long ago, all the good knights in Arthur's court had learned to love him.
"Bors and his fellows waited for Lancelot at Dover for a long time. At last Bors sent the army back to France, with all the knights except a few who were the best friends of Lancelot. With these he set out through England to search for him. They searched for a long time and at last they found him. And when they saw that he was a monk they said that they would all stay at Glastonbury and be monks too.