An exile from France, a prince who hides his identity and his person in
a remote Kentish village, and a girl with a highly imaginative
temperament like Lady Sue! here was surely a more definite, a more
important rival to the pretensions of homely country youths like Sir
Timothy Harrison or Squire Pyncheon, than even the student of humble
origin whose brother was a blacksmith, whose aunt was a Quakeress, and
who wandered about the park of Acol with hollow eyes fixed longingly on
the much-courted heiress.

Dame Harrison and Mistress Pyncheon both instinctively turned a
scrutinizing gaze on her ladyship. Neither of them was perhaps
ordinarily very observant, but self-interest had made them keen, and it
would have been impossible not to note the strange atmosphere which
seemed suddenly to pervade the entire personality of the young girl.

There was nothing in her face now expressive of whole-hearted
partisanship for an absent friend, such as she had displayed when she
felt that young Lambert was being unjustly sneered at; rather was it a
kind of entranced and arrested thought, as if her mind, having come in
contact with one all-absorbing idea, had ceased to function in any other
direction save that one.

Her cheeks no longer glowed, they seemed pale and transparent like those
of an ascetic; her lips were slightly parted, her eyes appeared
unconscious of everything round her, and gazing at something enchanting
beyond that bank of clouds which glimmered, snow-white, through the
trees.

"But what in the name of common sense is a French prince doing in Acol
village?" ejaculated Dame Harrison in her most strident voice, which had