[Illustration: BARBARA REBELL] BARBARA REBELL _By_ MRS. BELLOC-LOWNDES Author of "The Heart of Penelope" Frontispiece by GILBERT WHITE _AUTHORIZED EDITION_ NEW YORK B. W. DODGE AND COMPANY 1907 PROLOGUE. "Have regard to thy name; for that shall continue with thee above a thousand great treasures of gold." ECCLESIASTICUS xl. 12. Barbara Rebell's tenth birthday,--that is the ninth of June, 1870,--was destined to be long remembered by her as a day of days; both as having seen the first meeting with one who, though unknown till then, had occupied a great place in her imagination, if only because the name of this lady, her godmother, had been associated every night and morning with that of her father and mother in her prayers, and as having witnessed the greatest of her childish disappointments. Certain dates to most of us become in time retrospectively memorable, and doubtless this sunny, fragrant June day would in any case have been remembered by Barbara as the last of a long series of high days and holidays spent by her in her French home during the first few years of her life. Barbara Rebell left St. Germains two months after her tenth birthday; but the town which has seen so few changes in its stately, ordered beauty, since it afforded a magnificent hospitality to the last Stuart King and Queen of England, always remained to her "home," in the dear and intimate sense of the word, and that for many years after everything save the actual roof and walls of the villa where Mr. and Mrs. Rebell had lived such long, and on the whole such peaceful years, had been destroyed--overwhelmed with locust-like destruction--by the passage of an alien soldiery. But early in the June of 1870 there was nothing to show what July and August were to bring to France, and the various incidents which so much impressed the child's imagination, and made the day memorable, were almost wholly connected with that solitary inner life which is yet so curiously affected by material occurrences.