“Admit him! an’ it list your grace, it were scarce seemly in ladies to appear thus disarrayed--” “Heard ye, or heard ye not? I say, admit him! Think ye old Hunsdon cares to look upon such trumpery as ye, or must I wait upon my wenches’ pleasure? God’s head, but ye grow malapert!” The old queen’s voice had not yet ceased, before the door was opened; and although the ladies had taken the precaution of extinguishing the light, and seeking such concealment as the angles of the chamber afforded, the sturdy old earl--who, notwithstanding the queen’s assertion, had as quick an eye for beauty as many a younger gallant--could easily discover that the modesty which had demurred to the admission of a man was not by any means uncalled for or even squeamish. Had he been, however, much more inclined to linger by the way than his old-fashioned courtesy permitted, he must have been a bold man to delay; for twice, ere he could cross the floor to her chamber, did his name reach his ears in the impatient accents of Elizabeth: “Hunsdon! I say--Hunsdon! ’s death! art thou crippled, man?” There was little of the neatness or taste of modern days displayed in the decorations of the royal chamber. Tapestries there were, and velvet hangings, carpets from Turkey, and huge mirrors of Venetian steel; but a plentiful lack of linen, and of those thousand nameless comforts, which a peasant’s dame would miss to-day, uncared for in those rude times by princesses. Huge waxen torches flared in the wind, which found its way through the ill-constructed lattice; and a greater proportion of the smoke, from the logs smouldering in the jams of a chimney wider than that of a modern kitchen, reeked upward to the blackened rafters of the unceiled roof. Rigid and haughty, in the midst of this strange medley of negligence and splendor, sat the dreaded monarch, approached by none even of her most favored ministers save with fear and trembling. Her person, tall and slender from her earliest years, and now emaciated to almost superhuman leanness by the workings of her own restless spirit, even more than by her years, presented an aspect terrible, yet magnificent withal. It seemed as though the dauntless firmness of a more than masculine soul had won the power to support and animate a frame which it had rescued from the grave; it seemed as though the years which had blighted had failed in their efforts to destroy; it seemed as though that faded tenement of clay might yet endure, like the blasted oak, for countless years, although the summer foliage, which rendered it so beautiful of yore, had long since been scattered by the wild autumnal hurricane, or seared by the nipping frosts of winter. Her eye alone, in the general decay of her person, retained its wonted brilliancy, shining forth from her pale and withered features with a lustre so remarkable as to appear almost supernatural.