A year had passed since Margaret and her lover parted; a year of incessant strife and warfare throughout England; a year of suffering and sorrow and trial to the fair young girl, such as she never had endured before, since the day of her joyous childhood. The war, which had raged at first so fiercely in the western counties, had now, by the partial success of the royal arms, swept inland; and the royal host lay at Oxford where the court was assembled, and where the loyal parliament, for there were now two parliaments in the distracted kingdom, held their sittings. Tidings were, it is true, in those days carried to and fro with difficulty; split up as the whole country was by borough towns and hamlets, by the castles of the great, and the cottages of the poor, between the two contending factions; still, in spite of this, those who were interested in the fortunes of the contending armies, or in the fate of friends or relatives engaged on either side, contrived to ascertain which way the tide of events was setting, and of which host on every stricken field, the more and nobler victims had gone down before the merciless surge of civil fury. On the latter point, unhappily, the tale, for the most part, ran one way; for while the parliamentarians, even in their most galling and disastrous routs, lost only a few low-born fanatics, pimple-nosed serving-men, as Oliver himself has set down the bulk of the rebel forces, small shop-keepers, or broken farmers; the king’s army, even in its most glorious victories, had to deplore the fall of the good, the great, the far-descended, and the noble; so that for one man of quality and parts, and education, who had gone down on the rebel side, twenty of higher rank, and equal merit, probity, and valor, had been lost to the king’s supporters. It may be easily imagined, therefore, what must have been the constant agony of Margaret, as day after day brought tidings of some desperate skirmish or well-fought pitched battle, or some fierce onslaught, or slow famished leaguer; while weeks, perhaps, nay, months, elapsed before the names of those who had fallen were clearly ascertained, to relieve the breasts of the happy from anguish for a while, and to plunge their hapless neighbors in that only sorrow for which there is no earthly medicine. Thus far, that last stroke had been spared to Margaret; nay, hitherto from all that she had learned of her lover’s career in arms, she had derived unmixed satisfaction, and had been led at first to form sanguine hopes of the accomplishment of all her wishes.