Opposite the air-barge where the watcher sat, perhaps a hundred yards away, floated the royal boat, between a pair of warships, one blaze of scarlet, blue, and gold, flapping out the Royal Standard of England, and flashing the glass of the stern-cabin as the great creature rocked gently now and again in the breeze; and upon its deck rose up the canopy where the king and his consort sat together, and the line of scarlet guards visible behind.  On the warships on either side the crew waited, the ship itself dressed as for a review, every man motionless at his post, with the crash of brass sounding from the lower decks.  And so down the line the eye of the watcher went again and again, fascinated by the beauty and the glory, down past where the great ducal barges hung, each in order, past the officers of state, past the Parliament barges, down to where the boats, in numbers beyond all reckoning, faded away into the haze.

To those who looked across to where the man himself sat the sight must have been no less amazing.  For he sat there, in his new dress of Cardinal’s scarlet, on the throne of ceremony beneath his canopy with his attendants about him, on a wide deck laid down with scarlet, its prow crowned by the silver cross—­a silent watching figure, with a splendour of romance about him more suggestive even than the material glory that showed his newly won dignity.

There was not a soul there in those astounding crowds, whether among those who, hanging here between heaven and earth, awaited for the ceremonial reception, the coming of him who was Vicar of one and Lord of the other, or even among those incalculable multitudes beneath, who packed the streets, crowded the flat roofs and looked from every window.  It was this man, they knew, this tiny red figure, sitting solitary and motionless, who scarcely three months before had stood before the revolutionary Council of Berlin, of his own will and choice—­who had gone there and faced what seemed a certain death, for love of the old man whose body now lay beneath the high-altar of the tremendous cathedral beneath, and to whose office and honours he had succeeded, and for the sake of the message he had carried.  It was this man, alone of the whole Christian world, who after looking into the face of death, not for himself only, but for one who was dearer to him and to that Christian world than life itself, had seen in one moment the last storm roll away from human history for ever; who had seen with his own eyes, Christ in His Vicar—­Princeps gloriosus come at last—­take the power and reign.

He too was conscious of all this, at least subconsciously, as he sat motionless, a figure carved in ivory, a man who had found peace at last.  Here, in the contemplating brain, as with his eyes he looked over the vast city of London, enormous and exquisite beyond the dreams of either the reformers or the artists of a century ago, seen as through the crystal of the summer air, as he lifted his eyes now and again to