While Sir George awaited the Queen’s commands at Windsor, she sent him them.  He was not to go on his knees, a usual part of the ceremony of swearing in a Privy Councillor.  She had remembered, with a woman’s feeling, that here was a patriarch, nimble no longer.

The meeting between Queen and servant was stately, in that they were the two people who linked most intimately Great and Greater Britain.  To them Oceana was a living, sentient thing, not merely a glorious name and expanse.  It had squalled in their ears.  They could go back to the beginnings, could witness the whole panorama of the Colonies unroll itself.  They stood for the history of a high endeavour, which had been nobly crowned.  Oft, there had been weary clouds across the sky, not seldom heavy darkness.  But the sun was kept shining, and finally all had become light.  Oceana was grown up, and she gathered the four corners of her robe into that Windsor audience chamber.

Of the Queen’s order Sir George had the simple deliverance, ’It showed how careful Her Majesty is to manifest a strong consideration for all those who come in contact with her, a most taking quality in a Sovereign.’  Yet, for the first time in his life, he was to disobey that Sovereign.  Nothing, not even her protest of ‘No, no,’ could stop him from getting down on his knees, as if he had been a younger subject.  The infirmities were conquered by his desire to pay to the Queen that reverence and loyalty which had always been hers.  The bonds of age were burst, although his quaint complaint about himself that very evening was, ‘You know I want a minute or two to get in motion.’

Despite bowed shoulders and rusty joints, he still had something of the lithe, strenuous carriage of his youth.  In his dignity of manner, there almost seemed to you a glimpse of the gallant age when forbears had gone whistling to the headsman.  He was of a line which counted in English history, which among its women had a Lady Jane Grey.  His mother, with the mother’s wistful love and pride, had traced that line for him.  He was not deeply moved, unless by the romance and the tragedy that gathered about it.

But the aristocrat abode in the democrat, nature’s doing.  He was of the people in being whole-souled for them; he was not by them.  Verily, he had been through the winters in their interest.  The ripe harvest was in his hair, which had become thin above a face, rugged with intellect; over a broad, decisive brow, strewn with furrows.  It was a head of uncommon shape, with bumps and a poise, indicating at once the idealist and the man of action.  There it spoke truly, for Sir George was both; the two were one in him.

The chief secret of his personality seemed to rest in his eyes, and it was in them you met the dreamer of dreams.  ‘So I was often called,’ he would mention, ’and the answer is to hand.  Many of the dreams which I dreamt have been realised; that knowledge has been permitted me.  Whether it is any comfort I’m not sure, because, after all, my dreams are not nearly exhausted.