t forty, and he must have been an oldish man; although not too old
to be a bridegroom, and no longer under suspicion of insanity; for, in
addition to starting a second time as husband to Frances, Lady
Purbeck, it is recorded that after her death, which occurred in five
or six years, he married again,[102] and survived his first wife by
twelve years.

If the beginning of married life a second time, after an interval of
sixteen years--to say nothing of certain awkward incidents which had
transpired in the meantime--may have been a little out of the common,
it is more remarkable still that Lord Purbeck should have
acknowledged the boy, Robert Wright, as his son. As was shown in an
earlier chapter, it is just possible that he may have been ignorant of
the fact that the lad was not his own child, or rather, perhaps, that
he refused to believe in that fact. On the other hand, as the boy was
born in wedlock, he had in any case the right to acknowledge him as
such, if he so pleased. That was his concern, not ours, so we need not
cavil at it.

His doing so may be accounted for by either of the two following
suppositions: namely, that he acknowledged the boy out of affection
for, and to please, his wife--possibly it may have been one of the
inducements held out to persuade her to return to him--or that he
gradually took a fancy to the lad and chose this method of adopting
him. Whatever the cause of his acknowledging the boy may have been,
that acknowledgment encourages the idea that good relations existed
between Lord and Lady Purbeck after what may almost be called their
second marriage, or, perhaps still better called, their first real
marriage with consent on both sides.

Purbeck called the boy Robert Villiers, and would not allow him to be
spoken of as Robert Wright. When the lad came of age, Lord Purbeck
made him join with himself, as his son and heir, in the conveyance of
some lands, under the name of Robert Villiers,[103] the most formal of
legal recognitions.

It is likely that her life soon became that of an invalid, for she
died in the year 1645, when staying with her mother at Oxford. In that
year the Court of Charles I. was at this town, which may account for
her own and her mother's presence there. As we saw, in the first
chapter, there is some question as to whether Lady Purbeck was born in
the year 1599 or in 1600, so she may have been either forty-five or
forty-six at the time of her death. Her life, although