She had been
first the plaything of those elder girls who were finishing their education
in the convent, her childishness appealing to their love and pity; and
then, after being the plaything of the nuns and the elder pupils, she
became the favourite of her contemporaries, and in a manner their queen.
She was more thoughtful than her class-fellows, in advance of her years
in piety and intelligence; and they, knowing her sad story--how she was
severed from her country and kindred, her father a wanderer with his King,
her sister bred up at a foreign Court--had first compassionated and then
admired her. From her twelfth year upwards her intellectual superiority had
been recognised in the convent, alike by the nuns and their pupils. Her
aptitude at all learning, and her simple but profound piety, had impressed
everybody. At fourteen years of age they had christened her "the little
wonder;" but later, seeing that their praises embarrassed and even
distressed her, they had desisted from such loving flatteries, and were
content to worship her with a silent adulation.
Her father's visits to the Flemish city had been few and far apart, fondly
though he loved his motherless girl. He had been a wanderer for the most
part during those years, tossed upon troubled seas, fighting with Conde
against Mazarin and Anne of Austria, and reconciled with the Court later,
when peace was made, and his friends the Princes were forgiven; an exile
from France of his own free will when Louis banished his first cousin, the
King of England, in order to truckle to the triumphant usurper.
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