But if Mary, disliking her stepmother, of whom, indeed, she knew but little, and regarding her as a bigot whose pernicious influence drove James, in the opinion of the Princess Anne, into greater outrages upon justice than he would otherwise have inflicted; if Mary, thus prejudiced, gave not one reflection to her stepmother, nor doubted the reality of her imputed brother’s relationship, she might yet have bestowed some few natural tears upon the fate of her father. Many there were who could have told her, had her heart yearned for such or for any intelligence, how James, when his Queen and his son were gone, shuddered at the solitude of his palace; how, in every look from others, he read danger and dark design; how he dreaded alike kindness or distance; and when informed by Lord Halifax (who, to induce him to leave England, deceived him) that William meditated his death, he broke out into the bitter exclamation, “that small was the distance between the prisons of princes and their graves”: a saying which he quoted of his father, and which now appeared to his affrighted mind prophetic of his own destiny. The indecision, the confusion of mind, the helplessness of her father, might rise to Mary’s mind, as she entered the hall whence he had been accustomed to issue. The feebleness of majesty without power might occur to her; the hapless King ordering out guards, no longer his, to fight the Prince, and affecting to summon a council which would no longer meet at his command, might have induced some reflections on her own account. But Mary, unmoved, entered the palace, passed through those rooms which scarcely two months before had been opened, the day after James’s flight, to receive his expected levee, and walked unconcerned towards her bedchamber, and into the suite of apartments prepared for her. It was, on this occasion, the duty of Lady Churchill to attend her Majesty, and her account of the Queen’s conduct is too lively, has too much an air of truth, to be omitted. “I was one of those,” says the Duchess, “who had the honour to wait upon her (the Queen) to her own apartment. She ran about, looking into every closet and conveniency, and turning up the quilts upon the bed, as people do when they come into an inn, and with no other sort of concern in her appearance but such as they express; a behaviour which, though at that time I was extremely caressed by her, I thought very strange and unbecoming. For whatever necessity there was for deposing King James, he was still her father, who had been so lately driven from that chamber, and from that bed; and if she felt no tenderness, I thought she should at least have looked grave, or even pensively sad, at so melancholy a reverse of his fortune. But I kept these thoughts in my own breast, not imparting them even to my mistress, to whom I could say anything with all the freedom imaginable.”[150]