It was a beautiful spring day, and the crowd was a well–dressed and cheerful one. Nobody would have dreamed that they were about to attend a great public tragedy. As Elizabeth reached the top of the flight, she turned involuntarily to look at the beautiful panorama outspread before her in the Southern sunshine. Fair and faintly green lay the park–like gardens around the Capitol, while the golden dome of the National Library flashed and gleamed in the noonday radiance. Never before had she thought Washington a joyous–looking city, but to–day, with sunshine and life and motion, with its animated throng of persons, this continual passing to and fro, it reminded her of Paris on a fête day. While Elizabeth was looking upon the charming scene outspread before her, she heard the sound of trampling hoofs and the roll of a carriage below. Clavering, in his handsomest brougham, with a superb pair of horses, had just driven up. The coachman and footman wore the newest, smartest, and blackest of mourning liveries for the mistress they had seen ignored, when not insulted, during the whole term of their service. Forth from the carriage, a cynosure for the staring, curious crowd, stepped Clavering. He, too, was dressed in new and immaculate mourning, with a crape–covered hat. Elizabeth shrank behind one of the huge pillars, but from it she saw Clavering’s dignified and ever graceful air as he braved the glances of the multitude. The lower entrance being jammed with people, he leisurely mounted the great flight of steps, a thing he had never before done in all his senatorial service. The crowd watched him with admiration and gratitude—it gave them the more time and the better opportunity of seeing him. He passed close enough to Elizabeth to have touched her, as she stood quaking with shame and fear; but, looking neither to the right nor to the left, he walked on, calm, courageous, and apparently at ease with himself and all the world. Elizabeth, still moved by an impulse stronger than her will, pressed forward through the rotunda into the corridors. They were packed, and the doors to the public galleries had long been closed. Elizabeth found herself in the midst of a surging crowd, in the corridor leading to the reserved gallery, the place to which Clavering had told her he could no longer admit her. While she was standing there, crushed on either side, a pathway was opened, and a party of senators’ wives approached the door. At the same moment it was opened and some people came out. In the slight confusion several tried to get in; the doorkeepers, trying to separate the sheep from the goats, pushed the intruders back and pushed Elizabeth in with the senatorial party. “But I have no right in here,” she said hurriedly to the doorkeeper who shoved her into the gallery.