The Chevalier's Daughter by Lucy Ellen Guernsey

THAT evening my father came home, bringing with him my English cousin, Andrew Corbet, whom I had never seen, and whom he had been expecting for some days. He had come over in the train of the English ambassador, and therefore was to some extent a sacred person, though the name of Englishman was not at that time considered in Europe as it came to be afterward. Charles the Second was but a subsidized vassal of Louis the Fourteenth, as every one knew.

It remained for the ungracious, silent little Dutchman, who came afterward, to raise England once more to her proper place among the nations. I may as well say here, not to make an unnecessary mystery, that Andrew Corbet was my destined husband, that arrangement having been made when we were both children. Such family arrangements were and are still common in France, where a girl's widest liberty is only a liberty of refusal, and a demoiselle would no more expect to choose her husband, than to choose her parents.