She asked not what manner of man this hereditary ruler might be; asked not whether he were wise or foolish, faithful or treacherous. She forgot all of tyranny and of double-dealing she had suffered from his forbears. She forgot even her terror of the scarlet spectre, the grim wolf of Rome, in her disgust at Puritan fervour which had torn down altar-rails, usurped church pulpits, destroyed the beauty of ancient cathedrals. Like a woman or a child, she held out her arms to the unknown, in a natural recoil from that iron rule which had extinguished her gaiety, silenced her noble liturgy, made innocent pleasures and elegant arts things forbidden. She wanted her churches, and her theatres, her cock-pits and taverns, and bear-gardens and maypoles back again. She wanted to be ruled by the law, and not by the sword; and she longed with a romantic longing for that young wanderer who had fled from her shores in a fishing-boat, with his life in his hand, to return in a glad procession of great ships dancing over summer seas, eating, drinking, gaming, in a coat worth scarce thirty shillings, and with empty pockets for his loyal subjects to make haste and fill. Angela had the convent parlour all to herself this fair spring morning. She was the favourite pupil of the nuns, had taken no vows, pledged herself to no noviciate, ever mindful of her promise to her father. She had lived as happily and as merrily in that abode of piety as she could have lived in the finest palace in Europe. There were other maidens, daughters of the French and Flemish nobility, who were taught and reared within those sombre precincts, and with them she had played and worked and laboured at such studies as became a young lady of quality. Like that fair daughter of affliction, Henrietta of England, she had gained in education by the troubles which had made her girlhood a time of seclusion. She had been first the plaything of those elder girls who were finishing their education in the convent, her childishness appealing to their love and pity; and then, after being the plaything of the nuns and the elder pupils, she became the favourite of her contemporaries, and in a manner their queen. She was more thoughtful than her class-fellows, in advance of her years in piety and intelligence; and they, knowing her sad story—how she was severed from her country and kindred, her father a wanderer with his King, her sister bred up at a foreign Court—had first compassionated and then admired her. From her twelfth year upwards her intellectual superiority had been recognised in the convent, alike by the nuns and their pupils. Her aptitude at all learning, and her simple but profound piety, had impressed everybody. At fourteen years of age they had christened her “the little wonder;” but later, seeing that their praises embarrassed and even distressed her, they had desisted from such loving flatteries, and were content to worship her with a silent adulation.