“You are simply the victim of man’s deceit,” said Elizabeth, wishing to mollify the now angry Xanthippe, who was on the verge of tears.  “I understood men, fortunately, and so never married.  I knew my father, and even if I hadn’t been a wise enough child to know him, I should not have wed, because he married enough to last one family for several years.”

“You must have had a hard time refusing all those lovely men, though,” sighed Ophelia.  “Of course, Sir Walter wasn’t as handsome as my dear Hamlet, but he was very fetching.”

“I cannot deny that,” said Elizabeth, “and I didn’t really have the heart to say no when he asked me; but I did tell him that if he married me I should not become Mrs. Raleigh, but that he should become King Elizabeth.  He fled to Virginia on the next steamer.  My diplomacy rid me of a very unpleasant duty.”

Chatting thus, the three famous spirits passed slowly along the path until they came to the sheltered nook in which the house-boat lay at anchor.

“There’s a case in point,” said Xanthippe, as the house-boat loomed up before them.  “All that luxury is for men; we women are not permitted to cross the gangplank.  Our husbands and brothers and friends go there; the door closes on them, and they are as completely lost to us as though they never existed.  We don’t know what goes on in there.  Socrates tells me that their amusements are of a most innocent nature, but how do I know what he means by that?  Furthermore, it keeps him from home, while I have to stay at home and be entertained by my sons, whom the Encyclopaedia Britannica rightly calls dull and fatuous.  In other words, club life for him, and dulness and fatuity for me.”

“I think myself they’re rather queer about letting women into that boat,” said Queen Elizabeth.  “But it isn’t Sir Walter’s fault.  He told me he tried to have them establish a Ladies’ Day, and that they agreed to do so, but have since resisted all his efforts to have a date set for the function.”

“It would be great fun to steal in there now, wouldn’t it,” giggled Ophelia.  “There doesn’t seem to be anybody about to prevent our doing so.”

“That’s true,” said Xanthippe.  “All the windows are closed, as if there wasn’t a soul there.  I’ve half a mind to take a peep in at the house.”

“I am with you,” said Elizabeth, her face lighting up with pleasure.  It was a great novelty, and an unpleasant one to her, to find some place where she could not go.  “Let’s do it,” she added.

So the three women tiptoed softly up the gang-plank, and, silently boarding the house-boat, peeped in at the windows.  What they saw merely whetted their curiosity.

“I must see more,” cried Elizabeth, rushing around to the door, which opened at her touch.  Xanthippe and Ophelia followed close on her heels, and shortly they found themselves, open-mouthed in wondering admiration, in the billiard-room of the floating palace, and Richard, the ghost of the best billiard-room attendant in or out of Hades, stood before them.