"Ah, Your Highness hath not heard the last news from England?" he asked quietly.
"News from England!" repeated Mary, "I hear nothing else——"
"Then you will have heard that the Convention is for making you Queen, Madam," he answered, "which perhaps is not quite the consummation His Highness desired."
Mary gazed at him a second, then made a motion with her gloved hand to the coachman.
"It is cold to keep the horses waiting," she said, and so drove on.
Cold indeed, and the snow beginning to fall in heavy flakes across the straight fronts of the noble houses in the Voorhout; the people of quality gathered there on horseback and on foot began to scatter before the chilly wind and slow darkness. The Princess shuddered inside her fur coat, and drove back to the 'huis ten bosch.'
As she passed down the gaunt avenues of bare trees overshadowing frozen water and frozen ground, showing between their dark trunks glimpses of a pale February sunset fast being blotted out by the thick snow clouds, she felt to her very heart the awful desolation of approaching change, the wild regret for a happy period closed, the unnameable loneliness which assailed her when she considered how she was being caught up and hurried into a whirl of events foreign and distasteful.
When she reached home she asked for her letters; but evidently the packet that had brought M. D'Avaux his had none for her. She made no comment, but played basset awhile with Lady Sunderland, went early to her prayers, then wept herself to sleep.
CHAPTER XVII
FAREWELL TO HOLLAND