Yet none the less was the work all to begin again. So begun again it was, and that most stubbornly. And it was well the land was fat, and the breed of horses unmatched in the west country, for, when our western discontent grew to a head in the year 1655, Rupert, his youngest son by his first lady, was with Penruddock at Salisbury, whither he carried and left, on his own undertaking, most of that painful saving. Some few of his following drifted back to Drayton, but Rupert had spent the gold and himself for his King, even as Sir Michael had now spent all his family. For Henry and Maurice, the elder sons, had fallen, the one at Worcester fight, the other in duel with a Frenchman at The Hague, whither he had followed his sovereign, his opponent, it was said, being a spy of Cardinal Mazarin, and suspected by my brother of some ill intent to his exiled prince. Over and above all these troubles, that same affair of Penruddock's, so foolish and ill-devised, cost Sir Michael within the year the life of his wife, after a union with her of six and twenty years of that nature as to soften much the sting of his many afflictions, though it could not keep her own heart from bursting with the loss of the last child of their love. His thereafter speedy marriage with my own dear mother, whom I do but faintly remember, had in it no token, whatever the show may have been, of disrespect to the former Lady Drayton. But here again is a story to excel, perhaps, in the right telling of it, the length of my own. Yet I do not purpose a full relation of so much sorrow, holding that the strong hand only of a master in letters should essay the portraiture of such tragedy as was in those days often enacted in the houses of many an old Royalist family.