icult, perhaps, to analyze rightly the feelings and sensations
of a young girl, when she is literally being swept off her feet in a
whirlpool of passion and romance.

Some few years later when Lady Sue wrote those charming memoirs which
are such an interesting record of her early life, she tried to note with
faithful accuracy what was the exact state of her mind when three months
after her first meeting with Prince Amede d'Orleans, she plighted her
troth to him and promised to marry him in secret and in defiance of her
guardian's more than probable opposition.

Her sentiments with regard to her mysterious lover were somewhat
complex, and undoubtedly she was too young, too inexperienced then to
differentiate between enthusiastic interest in a romantic personality,
and real, lasting, passionate love for a man, as apart from any halo of
romance which might be attached to him.

When she was a few years older she averred that she could never have
really loved her prince, because she always feared him. Hers, therefore,
was not the perfect love that casteth out fear. She was afraid of him in
his ardent moods, almost as much as when he allowed his unbridled temper
free rein. Whenever she walked through the dark bosquets of the park,
on her way to a meeting with her lover, she was invariably conscious of
a certain trepidation of all her nerves, a wonderment as to what he
would say when she saw him, how he would act; whether chide, or rave, or
merely reproach.

It was the gentle and pathetic terror of a child before a stern yet
much-loved parent. Yet she never mistrusted him ... perhaps because she
had never really seen him--only in outline, half wrapped in shadows, or
merely silhouetted against a weirdly lighted background. His appearance
had no tangible reality for her. She was in love with an ideal, not with
a man ... he was merely the mouthpiece of an individuality which was of
her own creation.

Added to all this there was the sense of isolation. She had lost her
mother when she was a baby; her father fell at Naseby. She herself had
been an only child, left helplessly stranded when the civil war
dispersed her relations and friends, some into exile, others in splendid
revolt within the fastnesses of their own homes, impoverished by pillage
and sequestration, rebellious, surrounded by spies, watching that
opportunity for retaliation which was so slow in coming.

Tossed hither and thither by Fate in spite of--or perhaps b