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Alick had installed Leam as the girl-queen of his imagination, and paid her the homage which she seemed to him to deserve more than many a real queen crowned and sceptered or princess born in the purple.

The marriage of Mary Stuart with the Dauphin of France had been celebrated in April 1558 and three days before the wedding the girl-queen had been brought to convey her kingdom away by deed to the House of Valois. The deed was kept secret; but Mary's demand of the crown matrimonial for her husband roused suspicions.

He never forgot the vision of the girl-queen in her sweeping widow's robes, across the great space between them, in the sunshine of the loggia her hand extended as if to hasten or to bless him a wonderful, unearthly light and strength in her face; and, for one moment as she met his gaze and understood the full depth of his devotion, the ghost of a smile as if it had been granted him to bring her in this hour of martyrdom one little ray of human comfort.

Lord Melbourne had begun his career as a person of idle habits and imprudent adventures, much given to coarse conversation, and unable to say the simplest thing without an oath. He ended it as the man of scrupulous dignity, tact, and delicacy, who moulded the innocent youth of a girl-queen, to his own lasting honor and England's gratitude.

The girl-Queen, surrounded by her Spanish attendants, spent her time in the enjoyment of the pleasures congenial to her age. According to Madame de Motteville, she was strikingly handsome, but rather Austrian than Spanish in her style of beauty, with an abundance of fair hair which she wore in ringlets about her face.

That sentiment was daily and hourly confirmed by all that was heard and seen of the girl-queen.

"I speak that you may forget it," he said: "for it seemeth to be a pleasing theme of discussion among you yet should be so no more a mere extravaganza of fancy that our girl-queen might wisely abandon." "Signore!" exclaimed the Lady of the Bernardini, rising indignantly, "I maintain the dignity of our Sovereign Lady's Court, while she perforce, from sore affliction, must be absent.

From this Palace the girl-Queen drove to Westminster, to be crowned, and returned to watch in the soft dusk of the summer evening all London illuminated in her honour. Here she announced her intended marriage to her Lords in Council; here she met her princely bridegroom come across the seas to wed her.

That lady was Lady William Russell sister, by the way, of the unhappy Lady Flora Hastings so cruelly caught in the meshes of an angry Court intrigue based on the natural, nay, inevitable, ignorance and want of worldly knowledge of a girl-Queen, the stupidity and lack of worldly wisdom of the Court Physicians, and the blundering bitterness of a group of Great Ladies the whole assisted and inflamed by the baser type of party-politician.

It is certain that the behavior of this girl-queen on these first two days of her reign "confounded the doctors" of the Church and State. Greville, who never praises except when praise is wrung out of him, can hardly say enough of her grace and graciousness, calmness and self- possession.