PattardHis mother, his aunt, his wife, these three had but one body among them, and that was now stricken in years, in hardship grown weak in strength and colour, so much had she clad herself in penitence and pains all this while and unremittingly drunk the water of humility. What her lover-son had laid upon her before he departed out of her land and went on his penitential pilgrimage, that she had wholly, with body and goods and patient soul, performed, many years long, more than twenty, and even so when he left she had been eight-and-thirty.
At that time he had been quite young, and would have, in riper years, probably made it milder for her, particularly as he could have told beforehand that Werimbald, her distant cousin, who after his disappearance became duke in Flaundres-Artoys, wou
