noon
From the wardrobes at the castle Olivia had chosen the coronation gown of Queen Mitygen herself . It was of fine lace woven in a single piece , and it lay in a foam of shining threads traced with pure lines of shadow . On her head were a jeweled coronal and jeweled hair-loops in the Phoenician fashion , once taken from a king 's casket and sent secretly , upon the decline of Assyrian ascendancy , to be bartered in the marts of Coele-Syria . Chains of jewels , in a noon of colour , lay about her throat , as once they lay upon the shoulders of the dead queens of Yaque and , before them , of the women of the elder dynasties long since recorded in indifferent dust . Girdling her waist was a zone of rubies that burned positive in the tempered light . With all her delicacy , Olivia was like her rubies -- vivid , graphic , delineated not by light but by line . The members of the High Council rustled in their colour and white , and flashed their golden stars ; the Golden Guards -LRB- save the apostate few who were that day sentenced to be set adrift -RRB- were filling the stairway like a bank of buttercups ; and Olivia 's women , led by Antoinette in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated , were entering by an opposite door .