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 rely. Three days after the
accession his Lordship was made Captain-General of the English army,
and intrusted with power over all warlike matters both at home and
abroad. 'Twas a moment of tremendous import--the Alliance shaken by