in his diary. He had a glimpse of her one day riding in the Park
with the King, and a troop of ladies, among whom my Lady Castlemaine,
looking, as he tells us, "mighty out of humour." There was a moment when
Miss Stewart came very near to becoming Queen of England, and although
she never reached that eminence, yet her effigy not only found its way
into the coinage, but abides there to this day (more perdurable than
that of any actual queen) in the figure of Britannia, for which she was
the model.

Charles wooed her openly. It was never his way to study appearances
in these matters. He was so assiduous that it became customary in
that winter of 1666 for those seeking the King at Whitehall to
inquire whether he were above or below--"below" meaning Miss Stewart's
apartments on the ground-floor of the palace, in which apartments his
Majesty was a constant visitor. And since where the King goes the Court
follows, and where the King smiles there the Court fawns, it resulted
that this child now found herself queering it over a court that flocked
to her apartments. Gallants and ladies came there to flirt and to
gossip, to gamble and to pay homage.

About a great table in her splendid salon, a company of rustling,
iridescent fops in satin and heavy periwigs, and of ladies with curled
head-dresses and bare shoulders, played at basset one night in January.
Conversation rippled, breaking here and there into laughter, white,
jewelled hands reached out for cards, or for a share of the heaps of
gold that swept this way and that with the varying fortunes of the game.

My Lady Castlemaine, seated between Etheredge and Rochester, played
in silence, with lips tight-set and brooding eyes. She had lost, it is
true, some L1500 that night; yet, a prodigal gamester, and one who came
easily by money, she had been known to lose ten times that sum and yet
preserve her smile. The source of her ill-humour was not the game. She
played recklessly, her attention wandering; those handsome, brooding
eyes of hers were intent upon watching what went on at the other end of
the long room. There, at a smaller table, sat Miss Stewart, half a dozen
gallants hovering near her, engaged upon a game of cards of a vastly
different sort. Miss Stewart did not gamble. The only purpose she could
find for cards was to build castles; and here she was building one with
the assistance of her gallants, and under the superintendence of his
Grace of Buckingham, who was as