The oars dipped, and the boat slipped away through the darkness,
steering a course for the two great poop lanterns that were
swinging rhythmically high up against the black background of the
night. The elderly gentleman, huddled now in the stern-sheets,
looked behind him--to look his last upon the England he had loved
and served and ruled. The lanthorn, shedding its wheel of yellow
light upon the jetty steps, was all of it that he could now see.

He sighed, and settled down again to face the poop lights,
dancing there above the invisible hull of the ship that was to
carry Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, lately Lord Chancellor of
England, into exile. As a dying man looks down the foreshortened
vista of his active life, so may Edward Hyde--whose career had
reached a finality but one degree removed from the finality of
death--have reviewed in that moment those thirty years of sincere
endeavour and high achievement since he had been a law student in
the Temple when Charles I. was King.

That King he had served faithfully, so faithfully that when the
desperate fortunes of the Royalist party made it necessary to
place the Prince of Wales beyond the reach of Cromwell, it was in
Sir Edward Hyde's care that the boy was sent upon his travels.
The present was not to be Hyde's first experience of exile. He
had known it, and of a bitter sort, in those impecunious days
when the Second Charles, whose steps he guided, was a needy,
homeless outcast. A man less staunch and loyal might have thrown
over so profitless a service. He had talents that would have
commanded a price in the Roundhead market. Yet staunchly adhering
to the Stuart fortunes, labouring ceaselessly and shrewdly in the
Stuart interest, employing his great ability and statecraft, he