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Any believer in transmigration could feel no doubt that the soul of the one man inhabited the other. Third and youngest child of Edmund Duke of York and his first wife Isabel of Castilla: born at Conisborough Castle, Yorkshire, whence, according to the custom of his time, he was usually known as Richard of Conisborough.

She shuddered within herself when the King or his Mentor the Archbishop addressed her, shrinking from both with the instinctive aversion of a song-bird to a serpent; but Richard of Conisborough spoke as no one else spoke to her so courteously, so gently, so kindly, that no room was left for fear. No one had ever spoken so to this girl since her father died.

It was built in a new fashion that was made in France, and to which our English eyes were unaccustomed, and is somewhat similar in plan to Conisborough Castle, in the valley of the Don. The plan is circular with three projecting towers, and the keep was protected by two circular ditches, one fifteen feet and the other thirty feet distant from its walls.

Even the clergy smiled, the clerk sought refuge in fetching the fallen volume, and a thrill of humorous feeling ran through the congregation. Mr. Cape did not say much to us about religion. He read prayers every morning and evening, and once or twice I heard him preach when he took duty in a village church not far from the famous castle of Conisborough.

But we, who know what lay hidden in the coming years, can see that God's time for her to die was the best and kindest time. And indications are not quite wanting, slight though they may be, that Richard of Conisborough was not a political, but a religious Lollard, and that this autumn journey of Anne Mortimer to the unknown land may have been a triumphal entry into the City of God.

And whatever shameful end be decreed for the servant, it can never surpass that of the Master. The utmost that any child of God can suffer for Christ, can never equal what Christ has suffered for him. And so, calm in mien, willing in heart, Richard of Conisborough went through the dark passage, to the Garden of God.

The lord of Conisborough had long grudged the master of Pontefract and Sandal his great position in Yorkshire. The natural rivalries of neighbouring potentates were further emphasised by personal animosity of the deadliest kind. Lancaster had long been at variance with his wife, Alice Lacy.

And we know the face of Richard of Conisborough, the finest and purest character of the royal line, the fairest bud of the White Rose. He has little wish to live longer. Life was stripped of its flowers for him four years ago, when he heard the earth cast on the coffin of his pale desert flower. She is in Heaven; and Christ is in Heaven; and Heaven is better than earth.

Was there in it no operation of those Divine wheels which "grind slowly, yet exceeding small?" no visitation, by Him to whom vengeance belongeth, of the sins of the guilty fathers upon the guiltless son vengeance for the broken heart of Richard of Bordeaux, for the judicial murder of Richard of Conisborough, for the dreary imprisoned girlhood of Anne Mortimer, and last, not least for the long, slow years of moral torture, ending with the bitter cup forced into the dying hand of the White Rose of Langley?

Richard of Conisborough and Anne Mortimer were already the parents of a daughter; and two months after the death of the Lady Le Despenser a son was born, who was hereafter to become the father of all the future kings of England. And while the young mother lay wrapped in her first tender gladness over her new treasure, God called her to come away to Him.