stable-boys, the kennels and their keepers, were loved
better than aught else. She learned to lisp the language of grooms' and
helpers, she cursed and swore as they did, she heard their songs and
stories, and was as familiar with profanity and obscene language as
other children are with nursery rhymes. Until she was five years old
Sir Jeoffry never set eyes upon her. Then a strange chance threw her in
his way and sealed her fate.

Straying through the house, having escaped from her woman, the child
had reached the big hall, and sate upon the floor playing with a
powder-flask she had found. 'Twas Sir Jeoffry's, and he, coming upon
her, not knowing her for his own offspring (not that such a knowledge
would have calmed his passion), he sprang upon her with curses and
soundly trounced her. Either of her sisters Anne or Barbara would have
been convulsed with terror, but this one was only roused to a fury as
much greater for her size than Sir Jeoffry was bigger than herself. She
flew at him and poured forth oaths, she shrieked at him and beat his
legs with his own crop, which she caught up from the floor where it lay
within reach, she tore at him with tooth and nail, and with such
strength and infant fearlessness as arrested him in his frenzy and
caused him to burst forth laughing as if he had gone mad.

"From that hour she was a doomed creature," my Lord ended. "What else
can a man call the poor beauteous, helpless thing. She is his companion
and playmate, and the toy and jest of his comrades. It is the scandal
of the county. At twelve she is as near a woman as other girls of
fourteen. At fifteen--!" and he stopped speaking.

"'Twould have been safer for her to have died beneath her dead mother's
body," said Roxholm, almost fiercely.

"Yes, safer!" said his Lordship. "Yet what a woman!--What a
woman!"--and here he broke off speech again.

_CHAPTER VIII_

_In which my Lady Betty Tantillion writes of a Scandal_

Scarce two years later, King William riding in the park at Hampton
Court was thrown from his horse--the animal stumbling over a
mole-hill--and his collar-bone broken. A mole-hill seems but a small
heap of earth to send a King to moulder beneath a heap of earth
himself, but the fall proved fatal to a system which had long been
weakening, and a few days later his Majesty died, commending my Lord
Marlborough to the Princess Anne as the guide and counsellor on whose
wisdom and power she might most safely re