and Queen. It stands amid the sand-dunes, looking out across the
Channel toward England. It is just such a square, plastered,
eight-room villa as might be rented for the summer months by a family
with an income of five thousand a year. The sentries who are on duty
at its gates and the mounted gendarmes who constantly patrol its
immediate vicinity, are the only signs that it is the residence of
royalty. Almost any morning you can see the King and Queen--he tall
and soldierly, with all griefs and anxieties which the war has brought
him showing in his face; she small and trim and girlishly
slender--riding on the hard sands of the beach, or strolling,
unaccompanied, amid the dunes. What must it mean to them to know that
though over there to the eastward lies Belgium, _their_ Belgium, they
cannot ride five miles toward it before they are halted by the German
bar; to know that beyond that little river where the trenches run
their people are suffering and waiting for help, and that, after
nearly three years, they are not a yard nearer to them?

How clearly I remembered the last time that I had seen the Queen. It
was in the Hotel St. Antoine, in Antwerp, the night before the flight
of the Government and the royal family to Ostend, and less than a week
before the fall of the city itself. For days past the grumble of the
guns had constantly been growing louder, the streams of wounded had
steadily increased; every one knew that the end was almost at hand. It
was just before the dinner-hour and the great lobby of the hotel was
crowded with officers--Belgian, French, and British--with members of
the fugitive Government and Diplomatic Corps, and a few unofficial
foreigners like myself. Then, unannounced and unaccompanied, the Queen
entered. She had come to say farewell to the invalid wife of the
Russian Minister, who was unable to go to the palace. She remained in
the Russians' apartments (during the bombardment, a few days later,
they were completely wrecked by a German shell) half an hour perhaps.
Then she came down the winding stairs, a pathetically girlish figure
in the simplest of white suits, leaning on the arm of the gallant old
diplomat. Quite automatically the throng in the lobby separated, so as
to form an aisle down which she passed. To those of us who were
nearest she put out her hand and, bending low, we kissed it. Then the
great doors were opened and she passed out into the darkness and the
rain--a Queen without a count