And yet, although we allow this to be truth, to some she must have been winsome and gracious. Not to the lower herd, almost certainly, for people below the rank of knights or dames were never, in those times, thought worthy the least consideration. To those who more nearly approached her own rank she may have been the generous personality she has ever been pictured, although for a true Castilian to be other than insufferably haughty and arrogant would seem, if traditions do not lie, to be against nature. To the King she was evidently all in all, or how explain the existence of so long and elaborate a series of crosses raised to the memory of his _chère reine_? Eighteen years after the famous incident of the poisoned wound the Queen died, on November 28, 1290. She breathed her last on the evening of that day at the village of Harby, in Nottinghamshire, whither she had accompanied the King on a royal progress he had been making through the Eastern Counties during the three preceding months. Parliament in those times was a perambulating body of lawgivers, following of necessity the footsteps of the monarch. The King, therefore, having arranged to stay at his Royal Palace of Clipstone, in Sherwood Forest, at the end of October, Parliament was summoned to meet there on the twenty-seventh of that month. Meanwhile, however, the Queen fell ill of a lingering fever, and for sake of the quiet that could not be obtained in the neighbourhood of the Court she was housed at Harby, twenty miles distant. But not all the care that was hers, nor the syrups and other medicines detailed in the old accounts, procured in haste from the city of Lincoln, five miles away, availed to avert the fatal conclusion of that wasting sickness. [Illustration: WALTHAM CROSS.]