and Queen Henrietta understand the meaning of what I had been doing, and he said the complaints sent up had evidently been much exaggerated, and envenomed by spite and distrust of me as a foreigner.  He could well enter into my grief at the desertion of my poor people, for how was it with those at Walwyn, deprived of the family to whom they had been used to look, with many widows and orphans made by the war, and the Church invaded by a loud-voiced empty-headed fanatic, who had swept away all that had been carefully preserved and honoured!  Should he ever see the old home more?

However, he took thought for my predicament.  I had no choice, he said, but to give way.  To resist would only make me be treated as a suspected person, and be relegated to a convent, out of reach of influencing my son, whom I might bring up to be a real power for good.

Then my dear brother smiled his sweetest smile, the sweeter for the sadness that had come into it, and kissed my fingers chivalrously, as he said that after all he could not but be grateful to the edict that had brought back to him the greatest delight that was left to him.  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘if it had only been in Anjou!’

‘If it had only been in Dorset, let us say at once,’ he answered.

Then came the other question whether I might not stay at home with the children, and give myself to devotion and good works, instead of throwing off my mourning and following my mother to all the gaieties of the court.

‘My poor mother!’ said Eustace.  ’You would not wish to make your example a standing condemnation of her?’

‘I cannot understand how she can find pleasure in these things,’ I cried.

‘There is much in her that we find it hard to understand,’ Eustace said; ’but you must remember that this is her own country, and that though she gave it up for my father’s sake, England has always been a land of exile to her, and we cannot wonder at her being glad to return to the society of her old friends.’

‘She has Annora to be with her.  Is not that enough?’

’Ah, Meg, I trusted to you to soothe poor Annora and make her more comfortable.’

’She seems to have no intention of putting herself under my influence,’ I said, rather hurt.

‘She soon will, when she finds out your English heart,’ said Eustace.  ’The poor child is a most unwilling exile, and is acting like our old friends the urchins, opposing the prickles to all.  But if my mother has Annora to watch over, you also have a charge.  A boy of this little man’s rank,’ he said, stroking the glossy curls of Gaspard, who was leaning on my lap, staring up in wonder at the unknown tongue spoken by his uncle, ’and so near the age of the king, will certainly be summoned to attend at court, and if you shut yourself up, you will be unable to follow him and guide him by your counsel.’

That was the chief of what my dear brother said to me on that morning.  I wrote it down at the moment because, though I trusted his wisdom and goodness with all my heart, I thought his being a Protestant might bias his view in some degree, and I wanted to know whether the Abbe thought me bound by my plans of devotion, which happily had not been vows.