Now, Daniel was not being held captive; Mr. Threader even tendered apologies to him more than once, and offered to put him on a hired coach to London. But this only made Daniel want to see it through with present company. (1) Partly it was class. To leap out of Mr. Threader’s excellent carriage and dash off to London in a grubby hack-coach would be to admit that he was in a hurry—which, in Mr. Threader’s crowd, was not done. (2) He had been worried, anyway, about his knees locking up if he were forced to sit for a long time; which would be true, axiomatically, in an efficient coach. The leisurely itinerary of Mr. Threader was just the one Daniel would have chosen, had he been afforded the power to choose. (3) He was not in a hurry anyway. According to what Enoch Root had confided to him in Boston, his summons from the Princess had been a single mote in a storm of activity that had broken in the Court of Hanover in the late spring and early summer of the year just concluded, after the signing of the Peace of Utrecht had brought the War of the Spanish Succession to an end, and got all the Princes and Parliaments of Europe thinking about what they were going to do with the rest of the Eighteenth Century. Caroline could be made the Princess of Wales, and Daniel’s errand could suddenly be imbued with all sorts of import and urgency, by two deaths—Queen Anne’s and Sophie’s. Perhaps Caroline had, at that time, had reasons to expect the former, and to fear the latter. Accordingly, she had begun to set her pieces out on the board, and dispatched her summons to Daniel. But both Anne and Sophie were still alive, as far as Daniel knew. So he was not even a pawn yet. ’Twere pointless, as well as self-important, to rush to London, so long as he was on the island, and able to reach the city on short notice. Better to take his time and to see that island, so that he would better understand how things were, and be a more competent pawn when the time came. Through the windows of Mr. Threader’s carriage he was viewing a country almost as strange to him as Japan. It was not only England’s unwonted peace and prosperity that made it strange to him. Too, it was that he was viewing places that Puritans and Professors did not get invited to. Since Daniel had never seen those places, he tended to forget they existed, and to discount the importance of the people who lived in them. But this was a mistake, which would make him a very poor and useless pawn indeed if he did not mend it; and weak pawns were liable to be sacrificed early in the game.