ready to hand, caught up a candle, and!--Little did I think
who it was that was hanging on his arm. So little did I know it
that my heart began to be drawn to St. Germain, where I still
imagined you. Altogether, after that prank, all broke out again. I
entertained the lads with a few more freaks, for which I did ample
penance, but it grew on me that in my case all was a weariness and a
sham, and that my demon might get a worse hold of me if I got into a
course of hypocrisy. They were very good to me, those fathers, but
Jesuits as they were, I doubt whether they ever fathomed me. Any
way, perhaps they thought I should be a scandal, but they agreed
with me that their order was not my vocation, and that we had better
part before my fiend drove me to do so with dishonour. They even
gave me recommendations to the French officers that were besieging
Tournay. I knew the Duke of Berwick a little at Portsmouth, and it
ended in my becoming under-secretary to the Duke of Chartres. A man
who knows languages has his value among Frenchmen, who despise all
but their own."

Peregrine did not enter into full details of this stage of his
career, and Anne was not fully informed of the habits that the young
Duke of Chartres, the future Regent Duke of Orleans, was already
developing, but she gathered that, what the young man called his
demon, had nearly undisputed sway over him, and she had not spent
eight months at St. Germain without knowing by report of the
dissolute manners of the substratum of fashionable society at Paris,
even though outward decorum had been restored by Madame de
Maintenon. Yet he seemed to have been crossed by fits of vehement
penitence, and almost the saddest part of the story was the mocking
tone in which he alluded to these.

He had sought service at the Court in the hope of meeting Miss
Woodford there, and had been grievously disappointed when he found
that she had long since returned to England. The sight of the
gracious and lovely countenance of the exiled Queen seemed always to
have moved and touched him, as in some inexplicable manner her eyes
and expression recalled to him those of Mrs. Woodford and Anne; but
the thought had apparently only stung him into the sense of being
forsaken and abandoned to his own devices or those of his evil
spirit.

One incident, occurring some three years previously, he told more
fully, as it had a considerable effect on his life. "I was
attending the Duke in th