ecause
of--her great wealth, she had found a refuge, though not a home, at Acol
Court; she had been of course too young at the time to understand
rightly the great conflict between the King's party and the Puritans,
but had naturally embraced the cause--for which her father's life had
been sacrificed--blindly, like a child of instinct, not like a woman of
thought.

Her guardian and Mistress de Chavasse stood for that faction of
Roundheads at which her father and all her relatives had sneered even
while they were being conquered and oppressed by them. She disliked them
both from the first; and chafed at the parsimonious habits of the house,
which stood in such glaring contrast to the easy lavishness of her own
luxurious home.

Fortunately for her, her guardian avoided rather than sought her
company. She met him at meals and scarcely more often than that, and
though she often heard his voice about the house, usually raised in
anger or impatience, he was invariably silent and taciturn when she was
present.

The presence of Richard Lambert, his humble devotion, his whole-hearted
sympathy and the occasional moments of conversation which she had with
him were the only bright moments in her dull life at the Court: and
there is small doubt but that the friendship and trust which
characterized her feelings towards him would soon have ripened into more
passionate love, but for the advent into her life of the mysterious
hero, who by his personality, his strange, secretive ways, his talk of
patriotism and liberty, at once took complete possession of her girlish
imagination.

She was perhaps just too young when she met Lambert; she had not yet
reached that dangerous threshold when girlhood looks from out obscure
ignorance into the glaring knowledge of womanhood. She was a child when
Lambert showed his love for her by a thousand little simple acts of
devotion and by the mute adoration expressed in his eyes. Lambert drew
her towards the threshold by his passionate love, and held her back
within the refuge of innocent girlhood by the sincerity and exaltation
of his worship.

With the first word of vehement, unreasoning passion, the mysterious
prince dragged the girl over that threshold into womanhood. He gave her
no time to think, no time to analyze her feelings; he rushed her into a
torrent of ardor and of excitement in which she never could pause in
order to draw breath.

To-night she had promised to marry him secretly--to s