ything but the principal piece she intended to play on the chessboard
of life.

For a few years Louise revelled in the new life which the amorous Duc
opened to her, and which only came to an end when the Admiral was
despatched, in command of a fleet, against the Turks, an expedition from
which he was fated never to return. Before he said good-bye, however,
Louise took care to make the next step on her ladder of world-conquest
secure. Through the Duc's influence she was appointed maid-of-honour to
Madame, sister-in-law to Louis XIV., and sister to the second Charles of
England, now restored to the throne of his fathers.

We can well imagine that the wool merchant's daughter wasted no sighs on
the lover she had lost. She had now a much wider and more splendid field
at the Court of France, for the exploiting of her dangerous gifts and
the indulgence of her ambition. That the new maid had no lack of lovers
we may be sure; for though she was not richly dowered with beauty she
always seems to have had a magnetic power over the hearts of men. We
know, too, that she singled out for special favour, the Comte de Sault,
the handsomest noble in France, a man skilled above all his fellows in
the then moribund knightly exercises; and that her _liaison_ with the
Comte, in a court where such intimacies were the fashion, added to,
rather than detracted from, her social prestige.

Such was the life of Louise de Querouaille up to the time when she made
her first acquaintance with the land in which she was destined to crown
her adventurous career, and to make herself at once the most dazzling
and the most hated figure in England. At this time Louis' designs on
Spain and Holland had received a rude check by the signing of an
alliance between England, Sweden, and the United Provinces; and it
became a matter of vital importance to detach England from a combination
so fatal to his schemes. With this object he decided to send Henrietta,
Duchess of Orleans, on a visit, ostensibly of affection, to her brother
Charles II., charged with a secret mission to induce him by every
artifice in her power to withdraw from the alliance.

How Henrietta returned flushed with triumph from this iniquitous
embassy, after ten days of high revelry at Dover, is well-known history.
Charles, in response to his favourite sister's pleading and bribes, not
only consented to desert his allies, but, as soon as he decently could,
to follow in the steps of his brother, t