"To visit my father; it is my first task on rising," returned Sibyll,
in a whisper.

"You must let me visit him, too, at a later hour. Find me here an
hour before noon, Sibyll."

The early morning was passed by Anne in the queen's company. The
refection, the embroidery frame, the closheys, filled up the hours.
The Duchess of Clarence had left the palace with her lord to visit the
king's mother at Baynard's Castle; and Anne's timid spirits were
saddened by the strangeness of the faces round her, and Elizabeth's
habitual silence. There was something in the weak and ill-fated queen
that ever failed to conciliate friends. Though perpetually striving
to form and create a party, she never succeeded in gaining confidence
or respect. And no one raised so high was ever left so friendless as
Elizabeth, when, in her awful widowhood, her dowry home became the
sanctuary. All her power was but the shadow of her husband's royal
sun, and vanished when the orb prematurely set; yet she had all gifts
of person in her favour, and a sleek smoothness of manner that seemed
to the superficial formed to win; but the voice was artificial, and
the eye cold and stealthy. About her formal precision there was an
eternal consciousness of self, a breathing egotism. Her laugh was
displeasing,--cynical, not mirthful; she had none of that
forgetfulness of self, that warmth when gay, that earnestness when
sad, which create sympathy. Her beauty was without loveliness, her
character without charm; every proportion in her form might allure the
sensualist; but there stopped the fascination. The mind was trivial,
though cunning and dissimulating; and the very evenness of her temper
seemed but the clockwork of a heart insensible to its own movements.