d. Although we were anxious to leave England before the depth of
winter, yet we were detained. Small parties had been dispatched to various
parts of England, in search of stragglers; we would not go, until we had
assured ourselves that in all human probability we did not leave behind a
single human being.

On our arrival in London, we found that the aged Countess of Windsor was
residing with her son in the palace of the Protectorate; we repaired to our
accustomed abode near Hyde Park. Idris now for the first time for many
years saw her mother, anxious to assure herself that the childishness of
old age did not mingle with unforgotten pride, to make this high-born dame
still so inveterate against me. Age and care had furrowed her cheeks, and
bent her form; but her eye was still bright, her manners authoritative and
unchanged; she received her daughter coldly, but displayed more feeling as
she folded her grand-children in her arms. It is our nature to wish to
continue our systems and thoughts to posterity through our own offspring.
The Countess had failed in this design with regard to her children; perhaps
she hoped to find the next remove in birth more tractable. Once Idris named
me casually--a frown, a convulsive gesture of anger, shook her mother,
and, with voice trembling with hate, she said--"I am of little worth in
this world; the young are impatient to push the old off the scene; but,
Idris, if you do not wish to see your mother expire at your feet, never
again name that person to me; all else I can bear; and now I am resigned to
the destruction of my cherished hopes: but it is too much to require that I
should love the instrument that providence gifted with murderous properties
for my destruction."

This was a strange speech, now that, on the empty stage, each might play
his part without impediment from the other. But the haughty Ex-Queen
thought as Octavius Caesar and Mark Antony,

We could not stall together
In the whole world.

The period of our departure was fixed for the twenty-fifth of November. The
weather was temperate; soft rains fell at night, and by day the wintry sun
shone out. Our numbers were to move forward in separate parties, and to go
by different routes, all to unite at last at Paris. Adrian and his
division, consisting in all of five hundred persons, were to take the
direction of Dover and Calais. On the twentieth of November, Adrian and I
rode for the last time through the streets of Lon