“There would be time,” she said quietly.  “But we shall never have another.”

She had hardened strangely.  It was as if the milk of motherhood, wasting in her, had packed itself in a crust about her heart.  He loved her; she never ceased to love him; but whereas under the public scourge something had broken, letting her free of opinion, to love the good and hate the evil for their own sakes, under this second and more mysterious visitation, she kept her courage indeed, but certainty was hers no longer; nor was she any longer free of opinion, but hardened her heart against it consciously, as against an enemy.

Not otherwise can I account for the image of Ruth Josselin—­my Lady Vyell—­Lady Good-for-Nothing—­as under these various names it flits, for the next few years, through annals, memoirs, correspondence, scandalous chronicles; now vindicated, now glanced at with unseemly nods and becks, anon passionately denounced; now purely shining, now balefully, above and between the clouds of those times; but always a star and an object of wonder.

“In all Massachusetts,” writes the Reverend Hiram Williams, B.D., in his tract entitled A Shoe Over Edom, “was no stronghold of Satan to compare with that built on a slope to the rearward of Boston, by Sir O—­V—­, Baronet.  Here with a woman, born of this Colony, of passing wit and beauty (both alike the dower of the Evil One), he kept house to the scandal of all devout persons, entertaining none but professed Enemies of our Liberties, Atheists, Gamesters.”  Here one may pause and suspect the reverend castigator of confusing several dislikes in one argument.  It is done sometimes, even in our own day, by religious folk who polemise in politics.  “Cards they played on the Sabbath.  Plays they rehearsed too, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Congreve and others, whose names may guarantee their lewdness. . . .  The woman, I have said, was fair; but of that sort their feet go down ever to Hell. . . .”

“My Noll’s Belle Sauvage,” writes Langton to Walpole, “continues a riddle.  I shall never solve it; yet ’till I have solved it, expect me not.  ’Tis certain she loves him; and because she loves him, her loyalty allows not hint of sadness even to me, his best friend.  Guess why she likes me?  ’Tis because (I am sure of it) even in the old clouded days I never took money from Noll, nor borrowed a shilling that I didn’t repay within the week.  She is a puzzle, I say; but somehow the key lies in this—­She is a woman that pays her debts. . . .

“They sail for Europe next spring; but not, as I understand for England, where his family may not receive her, and where by consequence he will not expose her to their slights.  If I have made you impatient to set eyes on her, you must e’enpack and pay that long-promised visit to Florence.  She is worth the pilgrimage.”

They sailed in the early spring of 1752—­Langton with them—­and duly came to port in the Tagus.  From Lisbon, after a short stay, they travelled to Paris, and from Paris across Switzerland to Italy, visiting in turn Turin, Venice, Ravenna, Florence, Rome, Naples, and returning from that port to Lisbon, where (the situation so charmed him) Sir Oliver bought and furnished a villa overlooking the Tagus.