win.

The psychical moment, she decided, had come when Lord Arlington invited
Charles and his Court to his palatial country-seat, Euston, where,
removed from censorious eyes and in the abandon of country-house
freedom, she could exhibit her true colours to full advantage. Over the
revels of which Euston was 183 the scene during a few intoxicating
weeks, it is but decent to draw the curtain. With such guests as the
merry and dissolute Charles, his boon-companions, experts in gallantry,
and his ladies, with most of whom an acquaintance with virtue was but a
faded memory, it is no difficult matter to raise a corner of the curtain
in imagination. One typical scene Forneron records thus:

"Lady Arlington, under the pretext of killing the tedium
of October evenings in a country-house, got up a
burlesque wedding, in which Louise de Querouaille was the
bride and the King the bridegroom, with all the immodest
ceremonies which marked, in the good old times, the
retirement of the former into the nuptial chamber."

It was precisely such a ceremony in which, a few years earlier, Charles
had figured with _La belle Stuart_, while Lady Castlemaine looked on
with laughter and applause.

[Illustration: LOUISE, DUCHESS OF PORTSMOUTH]

Such was the revolution that resulted from this country visit that
Louise de Querouaille returned to Whitehall, the avowed _maitresse en
titre_ to the King. The French maid-of-honour had justified the
confidence Louis reposed in her; and as reward she was appointed Lady of
the Bedchamber to Catherine, and wore a coronet as Duchess of
Portsmouth. More than this, the delighted Louis raised the wool
merchant's daughter to the proud rank of Duchesse d'Aubigny, in exchange
for which dignity she pledged herself to induce Charles to go to war
with Holland; to avow himself a Catholic; and to persuade his brother
and successor, the Duke of York, to take to wife a Princess of France.

Louise de Querouaille had now reached a dizzier height than, in the
wildest dreams of her girlhood, she had ever hoped to climb. She was a
double-Duchess, of England and of France, the mistress and counsellor of
a puppet-King, and an arbiter of the destinies of nations. Well might
her humble father, when he paid his Duchess-daughter a visit in London,
throw up his hands in amazement at the splendours with which his "petite
Louise" had surrounded herself! So high had she climbed that it seemed
at one t