The two men clambered back into the rumble, somewhat shamefaced, and each striving by muttered disclaimers to reject the charge of cowardice in favor of the other. The postilion, suddenly galvanized into activity, roused the horses with strange oaths and cries and fierce cracklings of the whip. Prudence closed the window and retired into the voluminous shelter of her cloak, and the interrupted journey was resumed. *CHAPTER II* *LADY DRUMLOCH* No further adventures overtook the two ladies. The mail-coach picked them up at the crossroads and carried them to London in course of time, where they were soon safely housed with their grandmother, Lady Drumloch. My Lady Drumloch was, as all the world knows, a very great lady, and back in the days of King Charles the Second had been a beauty and a toast. The daughter of a duke and the wife of an earl, she had queened it in two courts, had gone into exile with King James, intrigued and plotted with the Jacobites, and finally, having lost husband and son and fortune in her devotion to a hopeless cause, had made her peace with Queen Anne and returned to England to eke out her last years in the soul-crushing poverty of the great. But as with her she brought her two granddaughters, the Honorable Margaret Moffat and Lady Prudence Wynne, her meager little house on the outskirts of May fair soon became not only the Mecca of other Jacobites as aristocratic and as poor as herself, but of many who were neither Jacobites nor in reduced circumstances. Among both classes the Lady Prudence, though but fifteen, soon found courtiers to pick and choose from. The saucy child with her skin of milk and roses, her tangle of dark curling locks and her wonderful blue eyes, was already possessed of that mysterious charm of femininity by which the world has been swayed since the days of Eve. To gratify her grandmother’s ambition, and at the same time emancipate herself from the restrictions of the school-room, she married the Viscount Brooke, heir of the Earl of Overbridge. But the marriage resulted disastrously. The viscount had long before exhausted his private means, and although his father, hoping that marriage would sober and settle him, made a sufficiently liberal allowance to the young couple, a few months of reckless extravagance and gaiety plunged them in an ocean of debt, from which the viscount, in a fit of delirium, extricated himself by means of a bullet in his brain, leaving Prue a widow at sixteen with no home but her grandmother’s little house in Mayfair, and not a penny beyond the grudging bounty of her father-in-law.