After a happy, leisurely meal, they spent the rest of their holiday in wandering through the palace, until its melancholy, monastic grandeur subdued them almost to silence. Captain Desborough, a young officer who waited on Alice Heneage, was familiar with the building, and as he led them through the rooms he told them stories, good and ill, connected with the various apartments. Finally they came to one on the ground floor, that had been the private parlour of King Charles—a gloomy room furnished with a sombre magnificence—and here the young man drew the company closer to him, and said— "I can tell you something true and strange about this room. There were two prophecies made in it, and one of them has come to pass. King Charles stood at this window one day, just where we are now standing, and his three eldest children were with him. And a woman, swart as an Indian savage, with eyes full of a strange, glazing light, came suddenly before them. And she said to the King, ’Let me read the future of your children. It may comfort you when you will need comfort.’ But the King, being in one of his melancholy tempers, answered her haughtily, ’No mortal man or woman can foresee the future;’ and she looked scornfully at him, and putting a small steel mirror before his face said, ’Look!’ and the King cast down his eyes and saw his own head lying on a bloody sheet; and he shuddered and reeled as if he would have fallen. Then a look of pity came into the woman’s face, and she put aside the mirror, and said in a strange, far-off voice—as if she was already a long way distant—’When a dog dies in this room, your son will come to the throne again.’ And the King called loudly for his attendant, but when the officer came, the woman had disappeared, nor could any trace or tidings of her be found or heard tell of." And every one was strangely silent; they walked away separately and examined the fine tapestry hangings, but they said not a word to each other about the uncanny incident. It seemed only a fit sequence that their next visit should be through the low, narrow portals to the gloomy subterranean apartments, which had been the guard rooms, and which were still decorated with dusty battle flags and old arms and armour. A singular sensation of having been in these vault-like rooms before, a sense of far-backness, of existence stretching behind everlastingly, of sorrows great and unavailing, permeated the atmosphere. Jane felt that here, if anywhere, men of war might understand the barrenness of their lives, and anticipate the small, and gloomy harvest of their tremendous pilgrimage.