good things, and wore minever dresses and velvet robes which trailed all across the room. Perhaps the houses were not all built of gold; some of them might be silver; but at any rate the streets were paved with one or other of the precious metals. And of course, nobody in London was at all poor, and everybody had as much as he could possibly eat, and was quite warm and comfortable, and life was all music, and flowers, and sunshine. Poor little Maude! was her illusion much more extravagant than some of ours?

But, as we have seen, the hapless travellers never reached their bourne. And now even Mother was gone, and Maude was left alone in all the world. The nuns had not been particularly unkind to her; they had taught her many things, though they had not made her work beyond her strength; yet not one of them had given her what she missed most—sympathy. The result was that the child had been unhappy in the convent, and yet she could not have said why, had she been asked. But nobody ever asked that of little Maude. She was alone in all the world—the great, bare, hard, practical world.

For this was the side of the world presented to Maude.

The world is many-sided, and it presents various sides and corners to various people. The side which Maude saw was hard and bare. Hard bed, hard fare, hard work, hard words sometimes. Had she any opportunity of thinking the world a soft, comfortable, cushioned place, as some of her sisters find it?

This had been the child’s life up to the moment when Ursula Drew made her appearance on the scene. But now a new element was introduced; for Maude’s third home was a stately palace, filled with beautiful carvings, and delicate tracery, and exquisite colours, all which, lowest of the low as she was, she enjoyed with an intensity till then unknown to herself, and certainly not shared by any other in her sphere. That sense of the beautiful, which, trained in different directions, makes men poets, painters, and architects, was very strong in little Maude. She could not have explained in the least how it was that the curves in the stonework, or the rich colours in the windows of the great hall, gave her a mysterious sensation of pleasure, which she could not avoid detecting that they never gave to any of her kitchen associates; and she obtained many a scolding for her habit of what my Lady the Prioress had called “idle dreaming,” and Mistress Drew was pleased to term “lither laziness;” when, instead of cleaning pans, Maude was thinking poetry. Alas for little Maude! her vocation was not to think poetry; and it was to scour pans.

The Palace of Langley, which had become the scene of Maude’s pan-cleaning, was built in a large irregular pile. The kitchen and its attendant offices were at one end, and over them reigned Ursula Drew, who, though supreme in her government of Maude, was in reality only a vice-queen. Over Ursula ruled a man-cook, by name Warine de la Misericorde, concerning whom his subordinate’s standing joke was that “Misericorde was rarely (extremely) merciless.” But this potentate in his turn owed submission to the master of the household, a very great gentleman with gold embroidery on his coat, concerning whom Maude’s only definite notion was that he must be courtesied to very low indeed.

Master and mistress were mere names to Maude. The child was near-sighted, and though, like every other servant in the Palace, she ate daily in the great hall, her eyes were not sufficiently clear, from her low place at the extreme end, to make out anything on the distant dais beyond a number of grey shapeless shadows. She knew when the royal, and in her eyes semi-celestial persons in question were, or were not, at home; she had a dim idea that they bore the titles of Earl and Countess of Cambridge, and that they were nearly related to majesty itself; she now and then heard Ursula informed that my Lord was pleased to command a certain dish, or that my Lady had condescended to approve a particular sauce. She had noticed, moreover, that two of the grey shadows at the very top of the hall, and therefore among the most distinguished persons, were smaller than the rest; she inferred that these ineffable superiors had at least two children, and she often longed to inspect them within comfortable seeing distance. But no such good fortune had as yet befallen her. Their apartments were inaccessible fairy-land, and themselves beings scarcely to be gazed on with undazzled eyes.

Very monotonous was Maude’s new life:—cleaning pans, washing jars, sorting herbs, scouring pails, running numberless infinitesimal errands, doing everything that nobody else liked, hard-worked from morning to night, and called up from her hard pallet to recommence her toil before she had realised that she was asleep. Ursula’s temper, too, did not improve with time; and Parnel, the associate and contemporary of Maude, was by no means to be mistaken for an angel.

Parnel was three years older than Maude, and much better acquainted with her work. She could accomplish a marvellous quantity within a given time, when it pleased her; and it generally did please her to rush to the end of her task, and to spend the remaining time in teasing Maude. She had no positive unkind feeling towards the child, but she was extremely mischievous, and Maude being extremely teasable, the temptation of amusing her leisure by worrying the nervous and inexperienced child was too strong to be resisted. The occupations of her present life disgusted Maude beyond measure. The scullery-work, of which Ursula gave her the most unpleasant parts, was unspeakably revolting to her quick sense of artistic beauty, and to a certain delicacy and refinement of nature which she had inherited, not acquired; and which Ursula, if she could have comprehended it, would have despised with the intense contempt of the coarse mind for the fine. The child was one morning engaged in cleaning a very greasy saucepan, close to the open window, when, to her surprise, she was accosted by a strange voice in the base court, or back yard of the palace.

“Is that pleasant work—frotting (rubbing) yonder thing?”

Maude looked up into a pair of bright, kindly eyes, which belonged to a boy attired as a page, some three or four years older than herself. Something in the lad’s good-natured face won her confidence.

“No,” she answered honestly, “’tis right displeasant to have ado with such feune!” (dirt.)

“So me counted,” replied the boy. “What name hast thou, little maid?”

“Maude.”

“I have not seen thee here aforetime,” resumed the page.

“Nor I you,” said Maude. “I have bidden hither no long time. Whereabout sit you in hall?”

“Nigh the high end,” said he. “But we are only this day come from Clarendon with the Lord Edward, whom I and my fellows serve. Fare thee well, little maid!”

The bright eyes smiled at her, and the head nodded kindly, and passed on. But insignificant as the remarks were, Maude felt as if she had found a friend in the great wilderness of Langley Palace.

The next time the page’s head paused at her window, Maude summoned courage to ask him his name.

“Bertram Lyngern,” said he smilingly. “I have a longer name than thou.” (See Note 2.)

“And a father and mother?” asked Maude.

“A father,” said the boy. “He is one of my Lord’s knights; but for my mother,—the women say she died the day I was born.”

“I have ne father ne mother,” responded Maude, sorrowfully, “ne none to care for me in all the wide world.”

“Careth Mistress Drew nought for thee?”

Maude’s laugh was bitterly negative.

“Ne Parnel, thy fellow?”

“She striveth alway to abash (frighten) and trouble me,” sighed Maude.

“Poor Maude!” said Bertram, looking concerned. “Wouldst have me care for thee? May be I could render thy life somewhat lighter. If I talked with Parnel—”

“It were to no good,” said Maude, brushing away to get