With rapture the Queen gathered him into her arms, and the father kissed him with a vehemence that made him awake and cry.  St. Victor had thought it safer that his other attendants should come in by degrees in the morning, and thus Miss Woodford was the only actually effective nursery attendant at hand.  His food was waiting by the fire in his own sleeping chamber, and thither he was carried.  There the Queen held him on her lap, while Anne fed him, and he smiled at her and held out his arms.

The King came, and making a sign to Anne not to move, stood watching.

Presently he said, “She has kept one secret, we may trust her with another.”

“Oh, not yet, not yet,” implored the Queen.  “Now I have both my treasures again, let me rest in peace upon them for a little while.”

The King turned away with eyes full of tears while Anne was lulling the child to sleep.  She wondered, but durst not ask the Queen, where was the tiler’s wife; but later she learnt from Miss Dunord, that the woman had been so terrified by the cries of the multitude against the ‘pretender,’ and still more at the sight of the sea, that she had gone into transports of fright, implored to go home, and perhaps half wilfully, become useless, so that the weaning already commenced had to be expedited, and the fretfulness of the poor child had been one of the troubles for some days.  However, he seemed on his return to have forgotten his troubles, and Anne had him in her arms nearly all the next day.

It was not till late in the evening that Anne knew what the King had meant.  Then, while she was walking up and down the room, amusing the little Prince with showing by turns the window and his face in a large mirror, the Queen came in, evidently fresh from weeping, and holding out her arms for him, said, after looking to see that there was no other audience—­

“Child, the King would repose a trust in you.  He wills that you should accompany me to-night on a voyage to France to put this little angel in safety.”

“As your Majesty will,” returned Anne; “I will do my best.”

“So the King said.  He knew his brave sailor’s daughter was worthy of his trust, and you can speak French.  It is well, for we go under the escort of Messieurs de Lauzun and St. Victor.  Be ready at midnight.  Lady Strickland or the good Labadie will explain more to you, but do not speak of this to anyone else.  You have leave now,” she added, as she herself carried the child towards his father’s rooms.

The maiden’s heart swelled at the trust reposed in her, and the King’s kind words, and she kept back the sense of anxiety and doubt as to so vague a future.  She found Mrs. Labadie lying on her bed awake, but trying to rest between two busy nights, and she was then told that there was to be a flight from the palace of the Queen and Prince at midnight, Mrs. Labadie and Anne alone going with them, though Lord and Lady Powys and Lady Strickland, with the Queen’s