The second best bed at the Blue Bear, Dartwich, was not more comfortless than Lady Bell’s old closet at St. Bevis’s, or more devoid of domestic happiness and sympathy, than her room at Trevor Court. Her flight had prospered so far, alike beyond her expectations and her deserts; its farther progress was secured, and Lady Bell, with the strain on her forces relaxed, found herself more fairly and fully tired than she had ever been before in the whole course of her fifteen years of life. She said her prayers, dropping asleep between every sentence, but without the least sense of mockery in the act; on the contrary, with a pathetically delusive conviction at once of the rectitude and the inevitableness of her course. The moment she had finished, she sank into thorough insensibility, and was with difficulty aroused to keep her appointment in the hodden grey of an autumn morning. When Lady Bell descended to the public room, which, at that hour, was the kitchen of the inn, she found the party to which she had attached herself already assembled in travelling gear, and engaged without ceremony at breakfast. “Be quick, madam!” the lady in the mantle, with the baby in her lap, addressed her, in a tone of command, hardly looking at the person to whom she spoke, she was so full of her own affairs; “I must be at Thorpe before two o’clock, which, with the stoppage to bait, will take all our time. Besides, my child is ready to fall into his morning sleep, when he will travel with less hurt to him.” Lady Bell stared and submitted, not only because of the exigencies of the case, but as submission must be natural to all who came in contact with this lady. There was a natural, ineffaceable power, amounting to majesty, which did not suit ill with the woman, even at an anti-climax like this, when she was sitting on a wooden stool, in a common inn-kitchen, herself wrapped in a faded duffle mantle, and occupied, between the intervals of feeding the child, in supping heartily from a basin of bread and milk for her own breakfast. Lady Bell had seen royalty in fitting trappings, before a chair of state, on a state occasion, surrounded by the highest ceremonial, and waited upon by the utmost homage. The girl had been loyally impressed, not only by the pomp and show, but by the genuine queenliness which asserted itself in the plain, little, aggressively virtuous German lady who was then Queen-Consort of Great Britain. But she was now struck by the perception of another sort of queenliness, which is no less a birthright, and which does not belong to circumstances and situations, being born in the very nature, and pervading its every fibre. This lady’s full, frank tones, though they were sharper, bore a certain resemblance to Mrs. Sundon’s tones, so did her beauty to Mrs. Sundon’s beauty, for the stranger was also a beautiful woman, even more remarkably beautiful than Mrs. Sundon, and with a yet more distinguished cast of face.