Her father only laughed and held her close.
“We all of us have that same thought at times,” he said, “and in every heart there stirs, now and then, an impatience with the strict and bare Puritan life. We, who, when children, saw some of the glitter and gorgeousness of that golden age in England, the reign of Queen Elizabeth, cannot but feel a longing, sometimes, for that splendid pomp and show from which we have turned aside. It would be odd did not the echoes of our hidden desire still sound in the hearts of our sons and daughters. I can never forget how the great Queen once made a royal progress through the town near which I dwelt, and how I ran in the dust beside her procession, staring with all my eyes at the glittering array. Such shining soldiers, such ladies clad in velvet and cloth of gold, such heavy banners fluttering in the hot air! No Queen in a fairy tale could have shown a more splendid picture. And when I went back to the cottage where I lived with my uncle and aunt, saw him in his dark coat and Aunt Matilda in her scant grey dress, and looked about at the bare walls and the rough furniture, then I, like you, felt suddenly that it was a dreary business this of trying to be a good Puritan. Yet the following of our faith is not all, thank Heaven, in wearing a sober coat and going to meeting six hours every Sabbath.”
“Did you ever see the Queen again?” asked Margeret.
“Yes, I saw and spoke with her once, when I was still a little boy and she was an old woman. How I chanced to see her, and how my staid uncle broke through our strictest Puritan law, are both parts of the story that I was to tell you. Well, we will have the story first and then talk a little further of this grievous business of being a Puritan.
“You must remember,” he began, as Margeret nestled closer against his arm, “since I have told you so often, that all through my boyhood I lived with my uncle at the edge of a great, wonderful garden that belonged, not to any of the people thereabout, but to the English Crown. It was there that Queen Bess, when she was but the Princess Elizabeth Tudor, had lived when she was a girl. There, too, my father, Robert Radpath, who was heir to the neighbouring estates, used to play with her when they were children and up to the time when she became Queen. He never saw her after that day when she set off to London to assume the crown, but he was always loyal in her service and she stood ever his friend. He sailed on many of those long voyages for which Queen Elizabeth’s reign is famous; he and others of her brave sailors risked much that her flag should fly in distant, unknown corners of the world. When my father became a Puritan and the persecuting laws bore so heavily upon all of that faith that even the Queen’s interest seemed powerless to save him, she appointed him upon a mission to China, to bear a message from her to that far country’s mighty ruler. From that voyage he never returned.