Copied for this book by the kindness of the present Duke from the Gallery at Inveraray.] Miss Bellenden bore the telling of his guineas once, but when he began to count them again she remonstrated. “Sir,” she cried, “I cannot bear it; if you count your money any more, I will go out of the room.” The delicate-minded George, fresh from the mercenary and accommodating ladies of Herrenhausen, was not abashed at this rejoinder; he jingled his guineas against Mary’s pretty little ear. The result was exactly what it should have been. Mary rose with sparkling eyes and cheeks aflame, and with one well-directed blow, sent his purse and his guineas flying across the room; then Mary, probably aghast at her act, ran away. Another way of showing her contempt of her royal admirer was to stand with crossed arms in his presence. Later she wrote on this subject to Mrs. Howard, with whom she appeared to have formed a close intimacy; she was recommending a new maid-of-honour to her care: “I hope you will put her a little in the way of behaving before the Princess, such as not turning her back; and one thing runs mightily in my head, which is, crossing her arms, _as I did to the Prince_, and told him I was not cold but liked to stand so.”[13] But Miss Bellenden was in love, which is the greatest safeguard against such persons as the little German Prince of Wales. She loved a certain groom of the bedchamber to the Prince, Colonel John Campbell, some years later Duke of Argyle. But here George showed a little of the _noblesse_ which one expects from a descendant of Edward the Third. Finding that Mary Bellenden was in love, though he did not know the object of her affections, he showed no ill-feeling, but asked a pledge from her that she would not marry without informing him, and in return he would give her and her future husband his favour. But Mary had lived much at Court, and mistrusted princes. A year or two later she secretly married Colonel Campbell, and was no doubt very happy, but certainly impecunious in that long interval before she became a Duchess. In 1720 she writes to her friend Mrs. Howard, from Bath, and good and pure woman and loving wife though she was, her letter is a fair sample of the free and easy, not to say broad, style of even virtuous ladies of the period. “Oh! God,” she writes, “I am so sick of bills; for my part I believe I shall never be able to hear them mentioned without casting up my accounts--bills are _accounts_ you know. I do not know how your bills go in London, but I am sure mine are not dropped, for I paid one this morning as long as my arm and as broad as my.... “I intend to send you a letter of attorney, to enable you to dispose of my goods before I may leave this place--such is my condition.”