280
THE CONISTON CURSE.
"Yet I grieve for the fair branches, though of such evil tree;
But the weird is laid, and the curse is said, and it rests on thine and thee."
Away she pass'd, though many thought to stay her in the hall,
She glided from them, and not one had heard her footstep fall.
And one by one those children in their earliest youth declined,
Like sickening flowers that fade and fall before the blighting wind;
And their mother she too pined away, stricken by the same blast,
Till Sir John De Coniston was left, the lonely and the last.
