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Of course she liked Bloody Mary's faldstool the one Mary sat in for her marriage with Philip of Spain; and the MSS. signed by Ælfred the Great as a child, with his father. Women are caught by the personal element, I think, more than we are. And so interested was she in Jane Austen's memorial tablet, that she wouldn't be satisfied without going to see the house where Jane died.
Ah, then she felt very solemnly that she was Queen; and moving softly to a chair placed between the Chair of Homage and the altar, she knelt down on the "faldstool" before it, and meekly said her prayers.
So they went the three of them together. It was dark and still within the church; in front of the altar-steps were set a faldstool and a chair, where the Duke might pray, or sit if he were weary; two tall wax lights stood beside, and lit up the crimson cloth and the gold fringes, so that it seemed like a rare flower blossoming in the dark.
She forced the saddest, proudest of smiles, as he took her reluctant hands. And involuntarily her eyes travelled over the room, over the crucifix above the faldstool, the little altar to St. Joseph, the worn books upon his table. They were to her like the weapons and symbols of an enemy. He made her no direct answer. His face was for a moment grave and set.
Opening out of her bedroom was a small dressing-room that she had fitted up for this purpose with all the broad suggestiveness that marks the Higher Thought: decked with ornaments emblematical of at least three religions, and provided with a faldstool and an exceedingly easy chair.
Mark could not help thinking that somehow the incident was a proof that the detective had told the truth. The sermon over, the Bishop's attendant came up to him, while Father Murray went to marshal his little charges up to the foot of the altar. As the Bishop was about to sit down on the faldstool, Mark saw him whisper to the young priest beside him, the one Mark thought to be the secretary.
So they went the three of them together. It was dark and still within the church; in front of the altar-steps were set a faldstool and a chair, where the Duke might pray, or sit if he were weary; two tall wax lights stood beside, and lit up the crimson cloth and the gold fringes, so that it seemed like a rare flower blossoming in the dark.
She gazed steadily at Augustina for a little; then she turned to the faldstool beside the bed and the shelf above it, with Augustina's prayer-books, and on either side of the St. Joseph, on the wall, the portraits of Helbeck and his mother. The two nurses moved away to the window that she might be left a little to herself.
Again time passed, and she was kneeling at a faldstool in the great hall downstairs; but a dark screen had been placed so that she could not be seen by any one who came in to kneel at the rail that divided the upper part of the hall from the lower; and she saw nothing herself nothing but a Knight of Malta, in his black cloak with the great white Maltese cross on his shoulder, lying asleep on his back; and on each side of him three enormous wax torches were burning in silver candlesticks taller than a tall man.
The roof and windows were dark, save where here and there a rib of stone or a tracery stood out very rich and dim. All about there was a kind of holy smell, of wood and carven stone and incense-smoke. The chaplain knelt beneath the altar; and the Prince knelt down at the faldstool, the Duke beside him on the floor.
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