The queen’s court made a circuit of the ballroom. Then the queen took the throne prepared for her at the upper end of the room, her ladies-in-waiting placed themselves behind her and Mr. Cortlandt stood at his sovereign’s right. Two by two the courtiers came to the foot of the throne, moving in a lovely slow dance, made a profound bow to the queen and were presented to her by that resplendent gentleman at the queen’s right who, as Beth tried hard to realize, was in actual life her familiar Uncle Jim. She heard the great names of history repeated as she leaned forward to see every detail of the beautiful moving picture, Essex, Leicester, Suffolk, Bacon, Ben Jonson, Raleigh--Raleigh, who, as he made his bow to the queen, threw his cloak before her with a sweep of the arm, recalling the day he had spread it as a carpet over the mud beneath her tread. Beth knew it was a masquerade, a pageant, but she could not remember that these were not the personages whose names she heard, that she was a little girl in New York, not Judith Shakespeare in the London of three centuries gone. She did not want to remember it; she loved her transformation. “Oh, there’s Shakespeare! He said William Shakespeare, Natalie! Look, look!” cried Beth. “Don’t act ‘Much Ado About Nothing,’ if it is,” laughed Natalie, holding Beth down. A gentleman in black velvet, plainly clad, with a quill in the hand that carried also a simple hat, with a single black plume, was bowing before the queen at the moment. “Might one ask why so young a lady is so passionately interested in the appearance of Shakespeare?” asked a voice close behind Beth. All four children faced about with a jump. They did not know that there was any one besides themselves in the gallery. Aunt Alida had arranged that her dowager friends, and those who had come to see, not to take part in the ball, were placed in the other galleries that, as far as possible, the children might be alone. The gentleman who had spoken had entered unnoticed by them. He had taken off his mask and showed a pleasant, frank, manly face. He wore white velvet with crimson slashing and a crimson cloak. Beth did not know him, and her glance at her cousins showed her that he was a stranger to them. “Mercy, you frightened me!” cried Beth. “Shakespeare? Why, I forgot it wasn’t really him--he--for a minute. So of course it was exciting.” “It is because it doesn’t seem to me to be ‘of course’ that I wondered,” said the newcomer smiling at Beth. “I have known little girls who would have met Shakespeare in the flesh quite calmly. Might I ask if American children read the poet?” “Why, you’re English, aren’t you?” cried Dirk, noting his accent. “You’d better believe they don’t, not many of them. Beth’s death on old things and poets and all that.” “Are you Mr. Cortlandt’s children?” asked the stranger with a laugh that won Beth at once.