Her sentiments with regard to her mysterious lover were somewhat complex, and undoubtedly she was too young, too inexperienced then to differentiate between enthusiastic interest in a romantic personality, and real, lasting, passionate love for a man, as apart from any halo of romance which might be attached to him.

When she was a few years older she averred that she could never have really loved her prince, because she always feared him.  Hers, therefore, was not the perfect love that casteth out fear.  She was afraid of him in his ardent moods, almost as much as when he allowed his unbridled temper free rein.  Whenever she walked through the dark bosquets of the park, on her way to a meeting with her lover, she was invariably conscious of a certain trepidation of all her nerves, a wonderment as to what he would say when she saw him, how he would act; whether chide, or rave, or merely reproach.

It was the gentle and pathetic terror of a child before a stern yet much-loved parent.  Yet she never mistrusted him ... perhaps because she had never really seen him—­only in outline, half wrapped in shadows, or merely silhouetted against a weirdly lighted background.  His appearance had no tangible reality for her.  She was in love with an ideal, not with a man ... he was merely the mouthpiece of an individuality which was of her own creation.

Added to all this there was the sense of isolation.  She had lost her mother when she was a baby; her father fell at Naseby.  She herself had been an only child, left helplessly stranded when the civil war dispersed her relations and friends, some into exile, others in splendid revolt within the fastnesses of their own homes, impoverished by pillage and sequestration, rebellious, surrounded by spies, watching that opportunity for retaliation which was so slow in coming.

Tossed hither and thither by Fate in spite of—­or perhaps because of—­her great wealth, she had found a refuge, though not a home, at Acol Court; she had been of course too young at the time to understand rightly the great conflict between the King’s party and the Puritans, but had naturally embraced the cause—­for which her father’s life had been sacrificed—­blindly, like a child of instinct, not like a woman of thought.

Her guardian and Mistress de Chavasse stood for that faction of Roundheads at which her father and all her relatives had sneered even while they were being conquered and oppressed by them.  She disliked them both from the first; and chafed at the parsimonious habits of the house, which stood in such glaring contrast to the easy lavishness of her own luxurious home.

Fortunately for her, her guardian avoided rather than sought her company.  She met him at meals and scarcely more often than that, and though she often heard his voice about the house, usually raised in anger or impatience, he was invariably silent and taciturn when she was present.