"If I had as little love as yourself, I have been told enough of you to make me hate you, and then I believe I should have been more happy than I am like to be now. However," she continued, "if you can be so well contented never to see me, as I think you can by what you say, I will believe you, though I have not other people." No wonder the poor man was driven to his wits' end by such varied and contradictory moods. After avoiding him for weeks in the most marked and merciless manner she charges him with "being content never to see her." Although she had never uttered or penned a syllable of love in return for his reams of passionate protestations, she taunts him with having less love than herself! Was ever woman so hard to woo or to understand, or lover so patient under so much provocation? She further accused him of laughing at her when he was "at the Duke's side," to which he retorted "I was so far from that, that had it not been for shame I could have cried." She even swore that it was he who avoided _her_; and he proves to her that he had followed her elusive shadow everywhere, and had even "made his chair follow him, because I would see if there was any light in your chamber, but I saw none." But even this arch-coquette recognised that the most devoted lover's forbearance has its bounds, and she was much too clever a woman to strain them too far. When she had brought him to the verge of suicide by her moods and vapours she saw that the time of surrender had come; and when her lover's arm was at last around her waist and her head on his shoulder, she vowed that she had never ceased to love him from the first, and that she had never meant to be unkind! Thus it came to pass that one winter's day in 1677, at St James's Palace, John Churchill led his bride to the altar, which proved the portal to one of the happiest wedded lives that have ever fallen to the lot of mortals. How little, at that crowning moment, Sarah Churchill could have foreseen those distant days of the future, when she was left to walk alone the last stage of life, in which she would read and re-read, with tear-dimmed eyes, the faded letters which her coldness had wrung from her lover in the flood-tide of his passion and his despair. CHAPTER X THE ADVENTURES OF A VISCOUNT'S DAUGHTER When the Hon. Mary King first opened her eyes in Cork County late in the eighteenth century, her parents, who already had a "quiverful" of offspring, could little have foreseen the tragic chapter in the family annals in which this infant was to play the leading part. Had they done so, they might almost have been pardoned for wishing that she might die in her cradle, a blossom of innocence, before the blighting hand of Fate could sully her.