The brothers had been here before – side by side, taut with pain, knowing its slightest betrayal on their faces would be scrutinised the world over.
Twenty-five years ago they walked, arms locked stiffly by their sides, behind their adored mother Diana.
One tall, his handsome blond head and inscrutable face dipped; one tiny, his suit sleeves just too long, his baby face looking lost.
Yesterday, Prince William and Prince Harry, then just 15 and 12, now married men with children of their own, retraced those steps along London’s hushed Mall.
In the intervening years an ugly rift neither could have imagined a quarter of a century ago had split them. William, the new Prince of Wales was in uniform.
Harry, no longer a working royal, wore a plain suit. William’s head dipped again. Harry’s red brows furrowed.
Both, no doubt, were experiencing the same surreal sensation as they did 25 years ago.
“It was like I was outside of my body and just walking along doing what was expected of me,” a pained Harry admitted recently.
He has said it was the sound of horses’ hooves he remembers most clearly from that haunting day in September 1997. Yesterday the steady pad of boots on tarmac was the dominant sound.
The quick-paced march of the cortege, 75 steps a minute, tapped its way from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall behind the gun carriage and tiny oak coffin.
It was easy to get lost in that meditative beat and no doubt at times they did, accompanied by the drums and the trumpets, punctuated by the once-a-minute gong of Big Ben.
Both brothers have spoken about the trauma they suffered after Diana’s death, and the anguish of that day, when the decision was taken for the young boys to join their father, grandfather and uncle in following her coffin.
Harry has said the pain lay dormant until adulthood, when he struggled to numb it with alcohol and drugs, to “feel less like I was feeling”.
William too, has hinted at the rawness of his grief then, and how hard it was to digest, under the glare of public scrutiny.
“There’s nothing like it in the world,” he said. “There really isn’t.
“It’s like an earthquake has just run through the house and through your life and everything. Your mind is completely split. And it took me a while for it to actually sink in.”
As he walked behind his mother, his blank expression suggested just that: a teenage boy yet to absorb his loss.
The family tried to get them to talk, he said, adding: “But being so small at that age, it was very difficult to communicate or understand your feelings. It’s... it’s very complicated.”
No one could have imagined the tsunami of grief thousands of mourners would express for Princess Diana. It confused the boys.
“This was my mum – you never even met her,” Harry has said.
Yesterday, the grieving for the Queen was less wildly exhibited.
But also, perhaps lightening the brothers’ steps, this time there was applause and hails of God Save the King.
It was a day to say goodbye and thank-you, but also one to welcome a new dawn.
It’s a dawn, we all hope, in which William and Harry continue to walk side by side.
