rried off their
changeling--you remember how she told us the story of his being
changed as an infant, when we were children at Winchester; she
believes it as much as ever, and never let little Philip out of
her sight before he was baptized. I ask her, if the changeling
be gone, where is the true Peregrine? but she only wags her head
in answer.

A day or two later Anne heard from her uncle from Oxford. He was
extremely grieved at the condition of his beloved alma mater, with a
Roman Catholic Master reigning at University College, a doctor from
the Sorbonne and Fellows to match, inflicted by military force on
Magdalen, whose lawful children had been ejected with a violence
beyond anything that the colleges had suffered even in the time of
the Rebellion. If things went on as they were, he pronounced Oxford
would be no better than a Popish seminary: and he had the more
readily induced his old friend to consent to Charles's desire not to
remain there as a student, but to go abroad with Mr. Fellowes, one
of the expelled fellows of Magdalen, a clergyman of mature age, but
a man of the world, who had already acted as a travelling tutor.
Considering that the young widower was not yet twenty, and that all
his wife's wealth would be in his hands, also that his cousin Sedley
formed a dangerous link with the questionable diversions of the
garrison at Portsmouth, both father and friend felt that it was well
that he should be out of reach, and have other occupations for the
present.

Change of scene had, Dr. Woodford said, brightened the poor youth,
and he was showing more interest in passing events, but probably he
would never again be the light-hearted boy they used to know.

Anne could well believe it.

CHAPTER XVI: A ROYAL NURSERY

"The duty that I owe unto your Majesty
I seal upon the lips of this sweet babe."

King Richard III.

It was not till the Queen had moved from St. James's, where her son
had been born, to take up her abode at Whitehall, that Lady
Oglethorpe was considered to be disinfected from her children's
whooping-cough, and could conduct Mistress Anne Jacobina Woodford to
her new situation.

Anne remembered the place from times past, as she followed the lady
up the broad stairs to the state rooms, where the child was daily
carried for inspection by the nation to whom, it was assumed, he was
so welcome, but who, on the contrary, regarded him with the utmost
dislike and suspicion.

Whitehall w