"Then there can be no reason to fear," she said. "I will cast away this awful dread. Oh, Olive," she exclaimed, bursting into tears, "you have brought me new life. Do you know that sometimes during these last few days, since I heard of those Petitions, I have almost prayed that if such a fearful crime and curse could be hanging over England, my Mother might be taken to God first, and learn about it first there, where we shall understand it all. But you have comforted me, Olive. I need make no such prayers. What I have so dreaded can never be." I felt almost guilty of falsehood in letting her thus take comfort. Yet if my husband's fears about Lady Lucy were well-founded, there was little need for such a prayer. And to Time I might surely leave it to unveil the horrors that after all might be averted. But no intervention from above or from below came to avert the steady unfolding of the great tragedy on which the nation's eyes were fixed. The king went on to his doom, as the doomed in some terrible old tragedy of destiny, tremblingly watchful for the storm to break from the side whence there was no danger, but all the time advancing with blind fearlessness to confront the lightnings which were to smite him. In the solitary sea-washed walls of Hurst Castle he listened for the stealthy tread of the assassin. And when at midnight, on the 17th of December, the creak of the drawbridge was heard between the dash of the waves, and then the tramp of armed horsemen echoing beneath the castle-gate, the king rose and spent an hour alone in prayer. Colonel Harrison, who commanded these men, had been named to him as one likely to be employed to assassinate him. "I trust in God who is my helper," said the king to his faithful servant, Herbert; "but I would not be surprised. This is a fit place for such a purpose," and he was moved to tears; no unmanly tears, and no groundless fears. He was not the first of his unhappy race who had been the victim of treacherous midnight murders. But when on the morrow he recognized in Colonel Harrison's frank countenance and honest converse one incapable of such baseness, his spirits rose, and he rode away almost gayly with his escort of gallant and well-mounted men, courteous enough in their demeanour to him. In the daylight, and in the royal halls of Windsor, where they lodged him, he felt strong again in the sacredness of the king's person, and alas he fancied himself strong in those false schemes of policy which, and which only, had divested his royal person of its sacredness in the hearts of his people. "He had yet three games to play," he said, "the least of which gave him hope of regaining all."