Canterbury on the last stage of the journey to his
crown. Mounted on his horse, caparisoned in purple and gold, at the head
of a gay cavalcade of retainers, he rode proudly through the Kentish
lanes and villages: through avenues of wildly-cheering crowds, flinging
sweet may-blossoms and flowers under his horse's feet, and waving green
boughs over their heads in a frenzy of welcome.

[Illustration: SARAH, DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH]

And it was on this very day, as the "Merrie Monarch" was riding under
the flowery arches and fluttering pennons of London streets, to the
clanging of joy-bells and the thundering of cannon, with a procession
twenty thousand strong behind him, that Squire Jennings' daughter first
opened her eyes on the world in which, though her simple-minded father
little dreamt it, she was destined to play so brilliant a part. No
birthday could have been more auspicious than this which saw the
restoration of a nation's hope; and the sun which flooded it with
splendour was typical of the good fortune that was to gild the life-path
of the Sandridge baby.

If on that day Squire Richard had been told that his baby-girl would
live to wear a Duchess's coronet and to be the bosom-friend and
counsellor of a Queen of England, he would have laughed aloud; and yet
Fate had this and more in waiting for Sarah Jennings in the years to
come. The Squire himself professed to be no more than a plain
country-gentleman, who knew as much as any man about horses and the
management of acres, but knew no more of courts and coronets than of the
man in the moon.

His family, it is true, had been seated for generations on its broad
Hertfordshire lands, and his father had been dubbed a Knight of the Bath
when the Prince of Wales, later Charles I., himself received the
accolade. His mother, too, was a Thornhurst, of Agnes Court, Old Romney,
a family of old lineage and high respectability; but, apart from Sir
John, no Jennings had ever aspired even as high as a mere knighthood,
and certainly they were as far removed from coronets as from the North
Pole.

Squire Jennings had another daughter, Frances, at this time a winsome
little maid of eight summers, already showing promise of a rare
loveliness. And she, too, was destined to a career, almost as brilliant
as, and more adventurous than that of her baby-sister. Her story opened
when one day she was transported, as maid-of-honour to the Duchess of
York, from the modest home in Hertfords