owing day to the Duchess's drawing-room to pursue in person the
advantage her letter suggested. But the very moment he entered the room
by one door his capricious mistress left it by the other; and when, in
his anger at such cavalier treatment, he wrote to ask the meaning of it,
and if she did not think it impertinent, she left him in no doubt by
answering that she did it "that I may be freed from the trouble of ever
hearing from you more!"

Once more Churchill, just as he had begun to hope again, was relegated
to the shades of despair. She refused to speak to him, she avoided him
in a manner so marked that it became the talk of the Court, and brought
her lover into ridicule. To such extremity was he reduced that he
actually wrote to her maid to beg her intercession.

"Your mistress's usage to me is so barbarous that sure
she must be the worst woman in the world, or else she
would not be thus ill-natured. I have sent her a letter
which I desire you will give her. I do love her with all
my soul, but will not torment her; but if I cannot have
her love I shall despise her pity. For the sake of what
she has already done, let her read my letter and answer
it, and not use me thus like a footman."

In her reply to this letter Sarah assumed again an air of wounded
innocence. She had done nothing, she declared, with tears in her pen, to
deserve what he had written to her; and since he evidently had such a
poor opinion of her she was angry that she had too good a one of him.

"If I had as little love as yourself, I have been told
enough of you to make me hate you, and then I believe I
should have been more happy than I am like to be now.
However," she continued, "if you can be so well contented
never to see me, as I think you can by what you say, I
will believe you, though I have not other people."

No wonder the poor man was driven to his wits' end by such varied and
contradictory moods. After avoiding him for weeks in the most marked and
merciless manner she charges him with "being content never to see her."
Although she had never uttered or penned a syllable of love in return
for his reams of passionate protestations, she taunts him with having
less love than herself! Was ever woman so hard to woo or to understand,
or lover so patient under so much provocation?

She further accused him of laughing at her when he was "at the Duke's
side," to which he r