Philip Sidney’s low voice had been urgent, and the man who owed to him a perilous assignation made no tarrying.  With his cloak drawn about his face, and his hand busy with the small black mask, he passed swiftly along the gallery towards the door through which he had obtained entrance and where Sidney now waited with an anxious brow.  It was too late.  Suddenly before him, at the head of a short flight of stairs, the massive leaves of the great doors swung open and halberdiers appeared—­beyond them a confused yet stately approach of sound and color and indistinguishable forms.  The halberdiers advanced, a double line forming an aisle for the passage of some brilliant throng, and cutting off the door of escape.  Ferne looked over his shoulder.  From doors now opened at the farther end of the gallery people were entering, were ranging themselves along the walls.  There was a glimpse of a crowd without; beyond them, the palace stairs and the silver Thames.  A trumpet blew, and the crowd shouted, God save the Queen!

The tide of color rolled through the great inner doors, down to the level of the gallery, and so on towards the river and the waiting barges.  It caught upon its crest Philip Sidney, who, striving in vain to make his way back to where Ferne was standing, had received from the latter a most passionate and vehement gesture of dissuasion.  On came the bright wave, with menace of discomfiture and shame, towards the man who, surrounded though he was by petty courtiers, citizens, and country knights, could hardly fail of recognition.  Impossible now was his disguise, where every hat was off, where a velvet cloak swung from a shoulder was one thing, and a mantle of frieze quite another.  He dropped the latter at his feet, crushed the light mask in his hand, and waited.

It was not for long.  Down upon him swept the cortege—­the heart of the court of a virgin Queen.  At once keenly and as in a dream he viewed it.  Not less withdrawn was it now than a fairy pageant clear cut against rosy skies and watched by him from the stony bases of inaccessible cliffs—­and yet it was familiar, goodly, his old accustomed company.  This face—­and that—­and that! how he startled from it laughter or indifference or vagrant thought.  There were low exclamations, a woman’s slight scream, pause, confusion, and from the rear an authoritative voice demanding reason for the delay.  Past him, staring and murmuring, swept the peacock-tinted vanguard; then, Burleigh on one hand, Leicester on the other, encompassed and followed by the greatest names and the fairest faces of England, herself erect, ablaze with jewels, conscious of her power and at all times ready to wield it, came the daughter of Henry the Eighth.