I was quite provoked with him for being able to think of such matters when his father’s rescue was at stake; but he bade me ask his mother and mine whether it were not an important question, and then told me that he must make me understand the little comedy in which he was an actor.

Prince as he was, I could not help saying that I cared more for the tragedy in which we all might be actors; and he shrugged his shoulders, and said that life would be insupportable if all were to be taken in the grand serious way.  However, Prince Rupert appealed to him, and he was soon absorbed into the consultation.

My brother told us the next morning of the plan.  It was that Prince Rupert, with the ships which he had in waiting at Harfleur, should take a trusty band of cavaliers from Paris, surprise Carisbrooke, and carry off His Sacred Majesty.  Eustace was eager to go with them, and would listen to no representations from my mother of the danger his health would incur in such an expedition in the month of November.  She wept and entreated in vain.

‘What was his life good for,’ he said, ’but to be given for the King’s service?’

Then she appealed to me to persuade him, but he looked at me with his bright blue eyes and said: 

‘Meg learned better in Lorraine;’ and I went up and kissed him with tears in my eyes, and said:  ’Ah!  Madame, we have all had to learn how loyalty must come before life, and what is better than life.’

And then Annora cried out:  ’Well said, Margaret!  I do believe that you are an honest Englishwoman still.’

My brother went his way to consult with some of the other volunteers, and my mother called for her sedan chair to go and see whether she could get an order from Queen Henrietta to stop him, while Annora exclaimed: 

’Yes!  I know how it is, and mother cannot see it.  Eustace cares little for his life now, and the only chance of his ever overgetting it is the having something to do.  How can he forget while he lives moping here in banishment, with nothing better to do than to stroke the Queen’s spaniels?’

Then of course I asked what he had to get over.  I knew he had had a boyish admiration for Millicent Wardour, a young lady in Lady Northumberland’s household, but I had never dared inquire after her, having heard nothing about her since I left England.  My sister, whose mistrust of me had quite given way, told me all she knew.

Eustace had prevailed on my father to make proposals of marriage for her though not willingly, for my father did not like the politics of her father, Sir James Wardour, and my mother did not think the young gentlewoman a sufficient match for the heir of Walwyn and Ribaumont.  There was much haggling over the dowry and marriage portion, and in the midst, Sir James himself took, for his second wife, a stern and sour Puritan dame.  My mother and she were so utterly alien to each other that they affronted one another on their first introduction, and Sir James entirely surrendered himself to his new wife; the match was broken off, and Millicent was carried away into the country, having returned the ring and all other tokens that Eustace had given her.