“I believe he thinks we have all parted company with our wits,” she wrote. “He seldom sees me but to lecture me, in a sidelong way, upon my folly; for his railing at the company I keep hits me by implication. I believe these old courtiers of the late King are Puritans at heart; and that if Archbishop Laud were alive he would be as bitter against the sins of the town as any of the cushion-thumping Anabaptists that preach to the elect in back rooms and blind alleys. My father talks and thinks as if he had spent all his years of exile in the cave of the Seven Sleepers. And yet he fought shoulder to shoulder with some of the finest gentlemen in France—Condé, Turenne, Gramont, St. Evremond, Bussy, and the rest of them. But all the world is young, and full of wit and mirth, since his Majesty came to his own; and elderly limbs are too stiff to trip in our new dances. I doubt my father’s mind is as old-fashioned, and of as rigid a shape as his Court suit, at sight of which my best friends can scarce refrain from laughing.” This light mention of a parent whom she reverenced wounded Angela to the quick; and that wound was deepened a year later, when she was surprised by a visit from her father, of which no letter had forewarned her. She was walking in the convent garden, in her hour of recreation, tasting the sunny air, and the beauty of the many-coloured tulips in the long narrow borders, between two espalier rows trained with an exquisite neatness, and reputed to bear the finest golden pippins and Bergamot pears within fifty miles of the city. The trees were in blossom, and a wall of pink and white bloom rose up on either hand above the scarlet and amber tulips. Turning at the end of the long alley, where it met a wall that in August was flushed with the crimson velvet of peaches and nectarines, Angela saw a man advancing from the further end of the walk, attended by a lay sister. The high-crowned hat and pointed beard, the tall figure in a grey doublet crossed with a black sword-belt, the walk, the bearing, were unmistakable. It might have been a figure that had stepped out of Vandyke’s canvas. It had nothing of the fuss and flutter, the feathers and ruffles, the loose flow of brocade and velvet, that marked the costume of the young French Court. Angela ran to receive her father, and could scarce speak to him, she was so startled, and yet so glad. “Oh, sir, when I prayed for you at Mass this morning, how little I hoped for so much happiness! I had a letter from Hyacinth only a week ago, and she wrote nothing of your intentions. I knew not that you had crossed the sea.”