ld make out, a hundred yards away,
some kind of a gateway, that strode across the street, and gave access,
she supposed, to the Palace. Opposite, the windows were filled with
faces, and an enthusiastic loyalist was leaning, red-faced and
vociferous, calling to a friend in the crowd beneath, from a gallery
corresponding to that from which the girl was looking.

Of the procession nothing was at present to be seen. They had caught a
glimpse of colour somewhere to the east of the Abbey as they turned off
opposite Westminster Hall; and already the cry of the trumpets and the
increasing noise of a crowd out of sight, told the listeners that they
would not have long to wait.

Beneath, the crowd was arranging itself with admirable discipline,
dispersing in long lines two or three deep against the walls, so as to
leave a good space, and laughing good-humouredly at a couple of
officious persons in livery who had suddenly made their appearance. And
then, as the country girl herself smiled down, an exclamation from Alice
made her turn.

At first it was difficult to discern anything clearly in the stream
whose head began to discharge itself round the curve from the left. A
row of brightly-coloured uniforms, moving four abreast, came first,
visible above the tossing heads of horses. Then followed a group of
guards, whose steel caps passed suddenly into the sunlight that caught
them from between the houses, and went again into shadow.

And then at last, she caught a glimpse of the carriage, followed by
ladies on grey horses; and forgot all the rest.

This way and that she craned her head, gripping the oak post by which
she leaned, unconscious of all except that she was to see her in whom
England itself seemed to have been incarnated--the woman who, as perhaps
no other earthly sovereign in the world at that time, or before her, had
her people in a grasp that was not one of merely regal power. Even far
away in Derbyshire--even in the little country manor from which the girl
came, the aroma of that tremendous presence penetrated--of the woman
whom men loved to hail as the Virgin Queen, even though they might
question her virginity; the woman--"our Eliza," as the priest had named
her just now--who had made so shrewd an act of faith in her people that
they had responded with an unreserved act of love. It was this woman,
then, whom she was about to see; the sister of Mary and Edward, the
daughter of Henry and Anne Boleyn, who had recei