“I forgot,” said Betty meekly. “As for the towers you mention, they weren’t built till the eighteenth century, long after Henry the Seventh’s time.” “But though the Abbey looks different, it’s quite as _big_ as it is now, don’t you think so?” “Yes, it covers quite as much ground, though, as you see, a good deal of it looks different from the Abbey of our day. That’s because from time to time, certain parts have been pulled down, and built in another way. We’ll sit down here in the porch a moment and watch the people going in.” As they rested in the deep sculptured porch with the image of the Virgin above it, men, women, and children of all ranks were continually entering or leaving the Church. Now it was a soldier in a tight leather cap, leather tunic or jerkin, and long hose. Now a great lady arriving in a litter borne by serving-men from which she alighted in the porch, and swept into the Church. One of these wore a short velvet jacket edged with ermine, over a long silken skirt. Her hair was twisted up into bosses on either side of her ears, and covered with a golden net, and her cloak, kept together in front with a jewelled clasp, trailed behind her as she walked. Following her came a boy, perhaps her son, as fantastically dressed as the young man Betty had recently seen on London Bridge. All of the people, she noticed, crossed themselves as they passed the statue of the Virgin on entering the Abbey, and this reminded her that England was still a Roman Catholic country. [Illustration] She thought she would never be tired of watching the scene before her, nor of letting her eyes wander over all the monasteries and gardens enclosed by the walls of Westminster. The bells began to ring for service within the Abbey.... They were still ringing when she found the white-panelled walls of Godmother’s parlour round her, and rubbed her eyes as though to clear them of a vision.... “The Abbey bells!” exclaimed Godmother. “Ringing just as they rang long ago, when Chaucer was alive.” “You said we might perhaps see him,” said Betty. “But we didn’t.” She knew something about Chaucer, for she had read one or two of the stories from the “Canterbury Tales,” and now that she had looked at London as it was when he lived in it, she was anxious to see the great poet himself. “Plenty of time. Didn’t I promise you should go back again? As soon as we’ve taken a little walk about the Westminster of to-day, we can slip into fourteenth-century London as soon as we please.” “The best of this magic is that it doesn’t _really_ take any time, and yet it seems that we’ve been away hours and hours!” remarked Betty, as they turned out of Godmother’s quiet road. They were in Victoria Street now, with the Houses of Parliament shutting out the view of the river, and on their right the Abbey. There was a roar of traffic, and all the ground on the left was covered with great modern buildings.