Whatever was the nature of her feelings, the cold and light deportment which she manifested on her entrance into her palace at Whitehall, the last refuge of her deposed and deserted father, gave considerable offence. Mary, it was thought, might have remembered, with compassion, the unfortunate, and, as far as grave offences were concerned, the innocent Queen, her stepmother, Mary of Modena, who had last inhabited the very apartments into which she was now herself conducted. She might have bestowed one passing serious thought upon that unhappy fugitive, who only two months previously, had left that house privately, with her infant son, the Prince of Wales, then five months old, carried by his nurse; one faithful friend, the Count de Lauzun, the sole companion of her flight. From this palace she had crossed the Thames, in the darkness of night, unsheltered, in an open boat, the wind, and rain, and swell of the river, conspiring to detain and terrify her, and to add to the gloom of her situation. On this palace, standing for shelter under the walls of an old church in Lambeth, had the wretched Queen fixed her eyes, streaming with tears, and searching, with fruitless tenderness, for the flitting shadow of her husband across the lighted window; whilst, starting at every sound which came from that direction, the desolate mother sometimes suspended her anxious gaze, to look upon her sleeping infant,[149] unconscious of her miseries, unconscious of the hope deferred, the disappointment, the perplexities which awaited him in his future career, as the penalty to be paid for royal birth.