The death of the king was on everybody's mind. It was on the airwaves and in all the papers and in Time and the Pathé News and so, naturally, even the children, or those attuned to Grimm and the Morte d'Arthur and the fables and rhymes of Aesop and Mother Goose—sad stories (broken crowns and pledges) of the deaths of kings—were touched or, at least, affected by George's death. One of these, an American, was Ellen Carroll.

In the confessional, waiting to be heard, she was thinking not of her sins but of George V. All week long, in fact, the death of the king of England and the grief of his widowed queen were all Ellen Carroll could think of, night and day. Sad-sounding words and phrases kept recurring. "Succumbed to a chill"; "Buried with parents—Windsor"; "Six royal heads in attendance," (which she pictured like kings on cards, each with a crown and curls and clothes like motley); and saddest, along with the coffin, which the cook said was "made by a carpenter who lived in the village," "At the funeral the crowds were greater than any that ever gathered in the streets of London."

With so much on her mind, she had completely neglected her prayers—one of the things she would now be obliged to confess. Alone in her bed at night Ellen said "Six crowned heads" instead of her three Hail Marys and the Act of Contrition. Or she tried "in the village" a while. "A carpenter who lived in the village." It had a magical, fairy-tale ring. In fact, Ellen was sure it occurred not once but a couple of times in Once Upon A Time, that lovely work of Katherine Bates and Margaret Evans Price, with "Briar Rose" and "Furball"