Her thoughts went back to the swampy island of a thousand years ago. Here she was, standing on the very same isle. Yet how changed! Instead of a forest of reeds and bushes, here was a stately Palace and a still more stately Abbey. Busy men and women lived, where formerly only birds and water-rats made their homes. The island had, in fact, become a little town, divided from the greater city by massive walls. “We are facing the Palace now,” said Godmother presently. “Do you see anything about it that looks familiar?” “Why, surely that’s Westminster Hall?” Betty exclaimed after a moment, pointing to a long steep-roofed building in the midst of towers and pinnacles that were strange to her. “Yes, and the only part of the Old Palace that will remain to the time in which you and I live. It was built by William Rufus, so it is old, even in this fourteenth century.” “But it looks so new.” “That’s because it has just been altered and almost rebuilt by the King now reigning. Let us go and look at the beautiful inner roof of the Hall.” “The next time I see it, when we’ve moved on to our own time, it won’t look like this,” Betty observed, gazing up at its rafters as they entered Westminster Hall. “It will be all dark and old, won’t it? But it will be awfully interesting to think I saw it just after it was rebuilt and improved.” “That’s Richard’s coat of arms up there below the line of windows,” said Godmother. “You see the white hart is repeated again and again. Don’t forget to look out for it when you see this Hall again—in ordinary circumstances, I mean, without the ‘magic.’ And don’t forget either that, except for the Tower, there’s no building in our history that has seen so much misery,” she added. “Think of all the famous people who have been tried here, and condemned to death.” “Poor Charles the First was one, wasn’t he? Oh, Godmother, isn’t it strange to think it hasn’t happened yet—and won’t happen for—let me see?—about two hundred years!” “Now for just a glimpse of the Abbey,” said Godmother after a moment, “and then we’ll slip back into our own day for a little while. It won’t do to see too much all at once.” “I could stay for ever in this London!” Betty declared. “You’ll bring me back again, won’t you, Godmother? I mean to just this time in the fourteenth century. It’s so frightfully interesting.” She had turned round to gaze at the beautiful Abbey in front of the Palace, the very Abbey so near to which her godmother lived. But at first sight she scarcely recognized it as the old grey place she knew, blackened by the years and the smoke of ages. “It looks so clean and white,” she said. “And where are the towers that you see when you come up Victoria Street? And where is Henry the Seventh’s Chapel?” “Now there’s a silly child!” cried Godmother. “How could there be a Henry the Seventh’s Chapel when we are only at the reign of Richard the Second—nearly a hundred years before Henry the Seventh reigned?”