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with Alice and freed from menial labor. At that moment I would have gladly died for Sarah Marlborough.
    "Oh, madame! How can I ever thank you?"
    "By being a good girl and a good governess," Sarah replied brusquely. She was evidently not one who cared for gushing. "And now I suggest you pack your things and come up to London with me. Lady Rivers has been so good as to agree to your leaving immediately."
    Let me describe Sarah as she appeared to me then. Her skin was the purest alabaster, her eyes a flashing blue. Her nose, very regular, intensified one's sense of her force of character; her lips, sensuous and beautifully molded, were cherry red and the least bit petulant. Her hair was golden, and she held her head slightly to the side as she took you in—usually to find you wanting. Her voice was rich and warm, except when it rose to harshness or even stridency. She was, in brief, a magnificent creature, more like a goddess sent from Olympia on some Jovian mission than a mortal woman.
    She seemed to forget me almost as soon as she had picked me up, but then she was the busiest creature in the world. Holywell House at St. Albans, to which I was now transported, was a bustle of activity, and Sarah was always on the rush between it and St. James's Palace, where she was reputed to run the Princess Anne's household as despotically as she did her own. I was soon found qualified to give lessons in English history to the Ladies Mary and Anne Churchill, good-, looking girls but spoiled and of imperious temper. It was not an easy task, but I found in time that I could manage it, and the servants, well aware of my relationship to their awesome mistress, treated me with respect. But best of all, I had my darling sister Alice, who acted as an assistant housekeeper, and we were allowed to invite our brothers to the house whenever they could come. Truly, I thought I had all I could ever want in life.
    I did not come particularly to Sarah's attention again until I sickened with the dreaded smallpox. Let me solemnly record here that she saved my life. When none would go near me, the great lady herself sat by my bedside and held a bowl of ass's milk to my lips. I am told that on one occasion she even declined to leave me at the urgent summons of the Princess. Whatever else I may have to record in these pages of Sarah Churchill, let me set down here and now that she had the greatest courage and generosity. Had God given her less pride and stubbornness, she would have been as good a woman as she is a great one.
    She sometimes came to the classroom to be sure that I was giving proper instruction in our national history. Having, with her husband and the Prince and Princess of Denmark, been actively on the side of Dutch William in the Glorious Revolution, she was an ardent supporter of the church and crown. But unlike the Princess Anne, who favored the Tory party, Sarah was a violent Whig who believed that England's great mission was to unite Europe against the aggrandizement of Louis XIV. She was probably looking forward already to the day when her husband, as commander-in-chief, would make Queen Anne as feared and respected in the Old and New Worlds as the Sun King himself had ever been.
    I still had Jacobite leanings and said a quiet prayer at night for poor old King James, but it never would have occurred to me to create an issue with my splendid mistress, and I was perfectly willing to argue the cause of the Whigs to the girls, who didn't much listen to me anyway. I tried to preserve such small political integrity as I had by concentrating on the facts of constitutional history.
    But now I must come to the master of the house—or perhaps the master of every house but his own. There is no man of our times about whom there have been more varying opinions than John Churchill. His worst enemies have gone so far as to accuse him of treason, driven by an avarice so fierce as to make him betray his own soldiers for silver. His lesser enemies