“My liege, we are no traitors, amenable to no such charge,” calmly answered Gloucester; “far, far more truly, faithfully, devotedly your grace’s subjects than many of those who had shrunk from an act as this.  That in so doing we were likely to incur your royal displeasure, we acknowledge with deep regret and sorrow, and I take it no shame thus on my knee to beseech your highness’s indulgence for the fault; but if you deem it worthy of chastisement, we are ready to submit to it, denying, however, all graver charge, than that of failing in proper deference to your grace.”

“All other charge!  By St. Edward, is not that enough?” answered the king, but in a mollified tone.  “And thou, minion, thou whom we deemed the very paragon of integrity and honor, hast thou aught to say?  Did not thy lips frame falsehood, and thy bold looks confirm it?”

“My father, my noble father, pardon me that in this I erred,” answered Joan, kneeling by his side, and, despite his efforts to prevent it, clasping his hand and covering it with kisses; “yet I spoke no falsehood, uttered naught which was not truth.  She was ill and weakly; she was well-nigh maddened from scenes and sounds of blood.  I had besought her not to attend me, but a wife’s agony could not be restrained, and if we had refused her the protection she so wildly craved, had discovered her person to your highness, would it have availed thee aught? a being young, scarce past her childhood—­miserable, maddened well-nigh to death, her life wrapt up in her husband’s, which was forfeited to thee.”

“The wife of a traitor, the offspring of a traitress, connected on every side with treason, and canst ask if her detention would have availed us aught?  Joan, Joan, thy defence is but a weak one,” answered the king, sternly, but he called her “Joan,” and that simple word thrilled to her heart as the voice of former years, and her father felt a sudden gush of tears fall on the hand he had not withdrawn, and vainly he struggled against the softening feelings those tears had brought.  It was strange that, angered as he really was, the better feelings of Edward should in such a moment have so completely gained the ascendency.  Perhaps he was not proof against the contrast before him, presented in the persons of Buchan and Gloucester; the base villainy of the one, the exalted nobility of the other, alike shone forth the clearer from their unusually close contact.  In general, Edward was wont to deem these softening emotions foolish weaknesses, which he would banish by shunning the society of all those who could call them forth.  Their candid acknowledgment of having deserved his displeasure, and submission to his will, however, so soothed his self-love, his fondness for absolute power, that he permitted them to have vent with but little restraint.  Agnes might have been the wife of a traitor, but he was out of Edward’s way; the daughter of a traitress, but she was equally powerless; linked with treason, but too much crashed by her own misery to be sensible of aught else.  Surely she was too insignificant for him to persevere in wrath, and alienate by unmerited severity yet more the hearts which at such moments he felt he valued, despite his every effort to the contrary.