elder sons wanderers, her young daughter a prisoner."

"Poor Queen!" piped the small sweet voice, "I am so sorry for her."

Little had she ever known but sorrow, this child of the Great Rebellion,
born in the old Buckinghamshire manor house, while her father was at
Falmouth with the Prince--born in the midst of civil war, a stormy petrel,
bringing no message of peace from those unknown skies whence she came, a
harbinger of woe. Infant eyes love bright colours. This baby's eyes looked
upon a house hung with black. Her mother died before the child was a
fortnight old. They had christened her Angela. "Angel of Death," said the
father, when the news of his loss reached him, after the lapse of many
days. His fair young wife's coffin was in the family vault under the parish
church of St. Nicholas in the Vale, before he knew that he had lost her.

There was an elder daughter, Hyacinth, seven years the senior, who had been
sent across the Channel in the care of an old servant at the beginning of
the troubles between King and Parliament.

She had been placed in the charge of her maternal grandmother, the Marquise
de Montrond, who had taken ship for Calais when the Court left London,
leaving her royal mistress to weather the storm. A lady who had wealth and
prestige in her own country, who had been a famous beauty when Richelieu
was in power, and who had been admired by that serious and sober monarch,
Louis the Thirteenth, could scarcely be expected to put up with the shifts
and shortcomings of an Oxford lodging-house, with the ever-present fear of
finding herself in a town besieged by Lord Essex and the rebel army.

With Madame de Montrond, Hyacinth had been reared, partly in a mediaeval
mansion, with a portcullis and four squat towers, near the Chateau