The king, amazed at this new act of rebellion, retired precipitately from the council, and prepared with some of his former alacrity, to meet the combination against him. But Fortune, that had hitherto smiled upon him, seemed now to forsake him. He was defeated in every battle, driven from city to city, his health became impaired, his spirits failed, and at last he submitted to all the demands of his enemies, agreeing to pay twenty thousand marks to Philip, to permit his vassals to do homage to Richard, and above all, to give up Alice, the cause of so much domestic misery. He stipulated only for a list of the disaffected barons who had joined the French king. The first name that caught his eye was that of John, the idolized child of his old age. He read no further, but throwing down the paper, fell into one of those violent paroxysms of rage to which of late years he had been so fearfully subject. He cursed the day of his birth, called down maledictions upon his un-natural children and their treacherous mother, flung him-self upon the couch, tore the covers with his teeth, and clutched the hair from his head, and swooned away in a transport of anger and grief. A raging fever succeeded ; but in his lucid moments he superintended an artist, who, at his command, painted upon canvass, the device of a young eaglet picking out the eyes of an eagle. Day after day the monarch lingered and suffered between paroxysms of pain and grief, and intervals of lassitude and insensi-bility ; and when others forsook his bedside in weariness or alarm, Geoffrey, unconscious of drowsiness or fatigue, stood a patient watcher by his dying father. The feeble monarch recognized in the voice of this son the tones which his ear had loved in youth, and obeyed its slightest bid-ding; and the only alleviation of his agony was found in gazing upon the face that revived the image of his lost Rosamond. Taking the signet-ring from his finger, he placed it upon the hand of Geoffrey ; " Thou art my true and loyal son," said he. " The blessing of heaven rest upon thee for thy filial service to thy guilty sire. Com-mend ine to thy brother William and his beautiful bride. 190 HEROINES OF THE CRUSADES.