He ran up the steps and we followed him, across the platform to a low doorway in the base of the keep, through this, and up a winding staircase of spirals, so steep and so many that the head swam. Open lancet windows--one at each complete round of the stair-- admitted the morning breeze, and through them, as I clung to the newel and climbed dizzily, I had glimpses of the sea twinkling far below. I counted these windows up to ten or a dozen, but had lost my reckoning for minutes before we emerged, at my uncle's heels, upon a semi-circular landing, and in face of an iron-studded door, the hasp of which he rattled gently. A voice answered from within bidding him open, and very softly he thrust the door wide. The room into which we looked was of fair size and circular in shape. Three windows lit it, and between us and the nearest knelt Dom Basilio, busy with a web of linen which he was tearing into bandages. His was the voice that had commanded us to enter; and passing in, I was aware that the room had two other occupants; for behind the door stood a truckle bed, and along the bed lay my father, pale as death and swathed in bandages; and by the foot of the bed, on a stool, with a spinning-wheel beside her, sat a woman. It needed no second look to tell me her name. Mean cell though it was that held her, and mean her seat, the worn face could belong to no one meaner than a Queen. A spool of thread had rolled from her hand, across the floor; yet her hands upon her lap were shaped as though they still held it. As she sat now, rigid, with her eyes on the bed, she must have been sitting for minutes. So, while Dom Basilio snipped and rent at his bandages, she gazed at my father on the bed, and my father gazed back into her eyes, drinking the love in them; and the faces of both seemed to shine with a solemn awe. I think we must have been standing there on the threshold, we three, for close upon a minute before my father turned his eyes towards me-- so far beyond this life was he travelling, and so far had the sound of our entrance to follow and overtake his dying senses. "Prosper! . . ." "My father!" He lifted a hand weakly toward the bandages wrapping his breast. "These--these are of her spinning, lad. This is her bed they have laid me on. . . . Who is it stands there behind your shoulder?" "It is the Princess, father. You remember the Princess Camilla? Yes, madam"--I turned to the Queen--"it is your daughter I bring-- your daughter, and, with your blessing, my wife." The Queen, though her daughter knelt, did not offer to embrace her, but lifted two feeble hands over the bowed head as though to bless, while over her hands her gaze still rested on my father.