, extinct; but the restless love
of ascendancy is never extinct. The fashionable world were still
divided between her, and the rival whom she so despised, Catherine
Sedley, Duchess of Buckingham.

But Lady Nithisdale, living in the North, and possibly occupied with her
two children, remained, as she affirms, in the country, until the
intelligence of her lord's committal to the Tower brought her from her
seclusion years afterwards; she writes thus to her sister, the Lady Lucy
Herbert, Abbess of the English Augustine Nuns at Bruges, who had, it
seems, requested from her an account of the circumstances under which
Lord Nithisdale escaped from the Tower.

"I first came to London," Lady Nithisdale writes, "upon hearing that my
lord was committed to the Tower. I was at the same time informed that he
had expressed the greatest anxiety to see me, having, as he afterwards
told me, no one to console him till I came. I rode to Newcastle, and
from thence took the stage to York. When I arrived there, the snow was
so deep that the stage could not set out for London. The season was so
severe, and the roads so bad, that the post itself was stopped: however,
I took horses and rode to London, though the snow was generally above
the horses' girths and arrived safe without any accident."

After this perilous journey, the determined woman sought interviews with
the reigning Ministers, but she met with no encouragement; on the
contrary, she was assured that, although some of the prisoners were to
be saved, Lord Nithisdale would not be of the number.

"When I inquired," she continues, "into the reason of this distinction,
I could obtain no other answer than that they would not flatter me. But
I soon perceived the reasons, which they declined alleging me. A Roman
Catholic upon the frontiers of Scotland, who headed a very considerable
party, a man whose family had always signalized itself by its loyalty to
the royal house of Stuart, would," she argued, "become a very agreeable
sacrifice to the opposite party. They still," so thought Lady
Nithisdale, "remembered the defence of the castle of Carlaverock against
the republicans by Lord Nithisdale's grandfather, and were resolved not
to let his grandson escape from their power."

Upon weighing all these considerations, Lady Nithisdale perceived that
all hope of mercy was vain; she determined to dismiss all such
dependance from her mind, and to confide in her own efforts. It was not
impossible