“No,” Soames answered; “a mistake, my dear.”

“A lovely face!  And how she walk!  Elle est tres distinguee!”

Soames looked then.  Into his life, out of his life she had walked like that swaying and erect, remote, unseizable; ever eluding the contact of his soul!  He turned abruptly from that receding vision of the past.

“You’d better attend,” he said, “they’re coming now!”

But while he stood, grasping her arm, seemingly intent on the head of the procession, he was quivering with the sense of always missing something, with instinctive regret that he had not got them both.

Slow came the music and the march, till, in silence, the long line wound in through the Park gate.  He heard Annette whisper, “How sad it is and beautiful!” felt the clutch of her hand as she stood up on tiptoe; and the crowd’s emotion gripped him.  There it was—­the bier of the Queen, coffin of the Age slow passing!  And as it went by there came a murmuring groan from all the long line of those who watched, a sound such as Soames had never heard, so unconscious, primitive, deep and wild, that neither he nor any knew whether they had joined in uttering it.  Strange sound, indeed!  Tribute of an Age to its own death....  Ah!  Ah!....  The hold on life had slipped.  That which had seemed eternal was gone!  The Queen—­God bless her!

It moved on with the bier, that travelling groan, as a fire moves on over grass in a thin line; it kept step, and marched alongside down the dense crowds mile after mile.  It was a human sound, and yet inhuman, pushed out by animal subconsciousness, by intimate knowledge of universal death and change.  None of us—­none of us can hold on for ever!

It left silence for a little—­a very little time, till tongues began, eager to retrieve interest in the show.  Soames lingered just long enough to gratify Annette, then took her out of the Park to lunch at his father’s in Park Lane....

James had spent the morning gazing out of his bedroom window.  The last show he would see, last of so many!  So she was gone!  Well, she was getting an old woman.  Swithin and he had seen her crowned—­slim slip of a girl, not so old as Imogen!  She had got very stout of late.  Jolyon and he had seen her married to that German chap, her husband—­he had turned out all right before he died, and left her with that son of his.  And he remembered the many evenings he and his brothers and their cronies had wagged their heads over their wine and walnuts and that fellow in his salad days.  And now he had come to the throne.  They said he had steadied down—­he didn’t know—­couldn’t tell!  He’d make the money fly still, he shouldn’t wonder.  What a lot of people out there!  It didn’t seem so very long since he and Swithin stood in the crowd outside Westminster Abbey when she was crowned, and Swithin had taken him to Cremorne afterwards—­racketty chap, Swithin; no, it didn’t seem much longer ago than Jubilee Year, when he had joined with Roger in renting a balcony in Piccadilly.