if within reasonable
distance; those who had none at hand sat or walked quietly together.
Emma and Sarah were among these.

Any person entering Lincoln on the following Wednesday would plainly
have seen that the town was preparing for some great event. Every house
draped itself in some kind of hanging--the rich in coarse silk, the
poorer in bunting or whatever they could get. The iron hoops here and
there built into the walls for that purpose, held long pine-sticks, to
be lighted as torches after dark; and they would need careful watching,
for a great deal of the city was built of wood, and if a spark lighted
on the walls, a serious fire might be the result. In the numerous
balconies which projected from the better class of houses sat ladies
dressed in their handsomest garments on the Thursday morning, and below
in the street stood men and women packed tightly into a crowd, waiting
for the Queen to arrive. There was not much room in a mediaeval street,
and the sheriffs did not find it easy to keep a clear passage for the
royal train. As to keeping any passage for the traffic, that would have
been considered quite unnecessary. There was not much to keep it for;
and what there was could go round by back streets, just as well as not.
Few people set any value on time in the Middle Ages.

Queen Alianora was expected to arrive about twelve o'clock. She was not
the Queen Eleanor of whom we read at the beginning of the story (for
Alianora is only one of the old ways of spelling Eleanor), but her
daughter-in-law, the Lady Alianora who had been a friend to the dumb
Princess. She was a Spanish lady, and was one of the best and loveliest
Queens who ever reigned in England. Goodness and beauty are not always
found in company--perhaps I might say, not often; but they went together
with her. She was a Spanish blonde--which means that her hair was a
bright shade of golden--neither flaxen nor red; and that her eyes were a
deep, deep blue--the blue of a southern sky, such as we rarely if ever
see in an English one. Her complexion was fair and rosy, her features
regular and beautiful, her figure extremely elegant and
well-proportioned. The crowd, though good-humoured, was beginning to
get tired, when she came at last.

The Queen, who was not quite thirty years of age, rode on a white horse,
whose scarlet saddle-cloth was embroidered with golden lions and roses,
and which was led by Garcia, her Spanish Master of the Horse. S