Feria arrived in London on the 9th November, and found Mary lying in her palace of Saint James’s only intermittently conscious. She smiled sadly as the ambassador handed her Philip’s letter, and greeted her in his name; but she was too weak to read the lines he had written, though she indicated that a favourite ring of hers should be sent to him as a pledge of her love. Her faithful Clarentius and beloved Jane Dormer, already betrothed to Feria, whom she afterwards married, tended her day and night: but most of the others who had surrounded her in the day of her glory were wending their way to Hatfield, to court the fair-faced young woman with the thin lips and cold eyes who was waiting composedly for her coming crown. Feria himself took care to announce loudly his master’s approval of Elizabeth’s accession when her sister should die; and did his best to second the Queen’s efforts to obtain some assurance from the Princess that the Catholic faith and worship should be maintained in England. Elizabeth was cool and diplomatic. She knew well that she must succeed in any case, and was already fully agreed with her friends as to the course she should take, careful not to pledge herself too far for the future; and when Feria, leaving the Queen’s deathbed, travelled to Hatfield to see the Princess, she was courteous enough, but firmly rejected every suggestion that she should owe anything to the patronage of the King of Spain. Mary in her intervals of consciousness was devout and resigned, comforting the few friends who were left to sorrow around her bed, and exhorting them to faith and fortitude. It was the 17th November, and the light was struggling through the murky morning across the mist upon the marshes between Saint James’s and the Thames, when the daily mass in Mary’s dying chamber was being celebrated. The Queen was sick to death now, but the sacrament she ordered for the last time riveted her wandering brain, and the clouds that had obscured her intelligence passed away, giving place to almost preternatural clearness. She repeated the responses distinctly and firmly; and when the celebrant chanted ‘_Agnus Dei qui tollis peccatur mundi_,’ she exclaimed with almost startling plainness, ‘_Miserere nobis! Miserere nobis! Dona nobis pacem_‘; then, as the Host was elevated, she bowed in worship, with closed eyes that opened no more upon the world that for her had been so troubled.