He spent part of the year upon his various estates in the country, but quarrels of Whigs and Tories, changes in the Cabinet, and the bitter feeling against the march into Germany and the struggles which promised to result, gave him work to do in London and opportunities for the development of those abilities his Grace of Marlborough had marked in him.  The air on all sides was heavy with storm—­at Court the enemies of Duchess Sarah (and they were many, whether they confessed themselves or not) were prognosticating her fall from her high post of ruler of the Queen of England, and her lord from his pinnacle of fame; there were high Tories and Jacobites who did not fear to speak of the scaffold as the last stage likely to be reached by the greatest military commander the country had ever known in case his march into Germany ended in disaster.  There were indeed questions so momentous to be pondered over that for long months my lord Duke had but little time for reflection upon those incidents which had disturbed him by appearing to result from the workings of persistent Fate.

But in a locked cabinet in his private closet there lay a picture which sometimes, as it were, despite himself, he took from its hiding-place to look upon; and when he found himself gazing at the wondrous face of storm, with its great stag’s eyes, he knew that the mere sight waked in him the old tumult and that it did not lose its first strange, unexplained power.  And once sitting studying the picture, his thought uttered itself aloud, his voice curiously breaking upon the stillness of the room.

“It is,” he said, “as if that first hour a deep chord of music had been struck—­a stormy minor chord—­and each time I hear of her or see her the same chord is struck loud again, and never varies by a note.  I swear there is a question in her eyes—­and I—­I could answer it.  Yet, for my soul’s sake, I must keep away.”

He knew honour itself demanded this of him, for the stories which came to his ears were each wilder and more fantastic than the other, and sometimes spoke strange evil of her—­of her violent temper, of her wicked tongue, of her outraging of all customs and decencies, but, almost incredible as it seemed, none had yet proved that her high spirit and proud heart had been subjugated and she made victim by a conqueror.  ’Twas this which was talked of at the clubs and coffee-houses, where her name was known by those frequenting them.

“She would be like a hare let loose to be hounded to her death by every pack in the county,” my Lord Twemlow had said the night he talked of her at Dunstan’s Wolde, and every man agreed with him and waited for the outburst of a scandal, and made bets as to when it would break forth.  There were those among the successful heart-breakers whose vanity was piqued by the existence of so invincible and fantastical a female creature, and though my lord Duke did not hear of it, their worlds being far apart, the male beauty and rake, Sir John Oxon, was among them, his fretted pride being so well known among his fellow-beaux that ’twas their habit to make a joke of it and taunt him with their witticisms.