ce where the Queen had
suffered; and he had told the story so well that his listeners had
seemed to see it for themselves--the great hall hung with black
throughout; the raised scaffold at the further end beside the fire that
blazed on the wide hearth; the Queen's servants being led away
half-swooning as he came in; the dress of velvet, the straw and the
bloody sawdust, the beads and all the other pitiful relics being heaped
upon the fire as he stood there in the struggling mob; and, above all,
the fallen body, in its short skirt and bodice lying there where it fell
beside the low, black block. He had told all this as he had seen it for
himself, until the sheriff's men drove them all forth again into the
court; and he had told, too, of all that he had heard afterwards, that
had happened until my lord Shrewsbury's son had ridden out at a gallop
to take the news to court, and the imprisoned watchers had been allowed
to leave the Castle; how the little dog, that he had heard wailing, had
leapt out as the head fell at the third stroke, so that he was all
bathed in his mistress' blood--one of the very spaniels, no doubt, which
he himself had seen at Chartley; how the dog was taken away and washed
and given afterwards into Mr. Melville's charge; how the body and the
head had been taken upstairs, had been roughly embalmed, and laid in a
locked chamber; how her servants had been found peeping through the
keyhole and praying aloud there, till Sir Amyas had had the hole stopped
up. He had told them, too, of the events that followed; of the mass M.
de Preau had been permitted to say in the Queen's oratory on the morning
after; and of the oath that he had been forced to take that he would not
say it again; of the destruction of the oratory and the confiscation of
the altar furniture and vestments.

All this he had told, little by little; and of the Queen's noble bearing
upon the scaffold, her utter fearlessness, her protestations that she
died for her religion and for that only, and of the pesterings of Dr.
Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough, who had at last given over in despair,
and prayed instead. The rest they knew for themselves--of the miserable
falseness of Elizabeth, who feigned, after having signed the warrant and
sent it, that it was Mr. Davison's fault for doing as she told him; and
of her accusations (accusations that deceived no man) against those who
had served her; of the fires made in the streets of all great towns as a