The house, at the time of this visit, though magnificent, and of an immense magnitude, was very much out of repair, and by no means cheerful or comfortable. Gloomy grandeur, Fanny thought, was the character of the building and its fitting-up. “My bedroom,” she says, “was furnished with crimson velvet, bed included, yet so high, though only the second story, that it made me giddy to look into the park, and tired to wind up the flight of stairs. It was formerly the favourite room, the housekeeper told me, of Bishop Ken, who put on his shroud in it before he died. Had I fancied I had seen his ghost, I might have screamed my voice away, unheard by any assistant to lay it; for so far was I from the rest of the mansion, that not the lungs of Mr. Bruce could have availed me.” The last place at which the King stopped on his homeward journey was Tottenham Park, the seat of the Earl of Ailesbury. Here occurred an instance of the enormous expense to which the great nobles sometimes went in entertaining their sovereign. ‘The good lord of the mansion put up a new bed for the King and Queen that cost him £900.’ On September 18 the Court arrived at Windsor. ‘Deadly dead sank my heart’ is our traveller’s record of her sensation on re-entering the detested dining-room. Nothing happened during the remainder of the year to raise her spirits. In October, the days began to remind her of the terrible miseries of the preceding autumn. She found ‘a sort of recollective melancholy always ready to mix’ with her thankfulness for the King’s continued good health. And about the same time disquieting news came from over the water of the march to Versailles, the return to Paris, and the shouts of the hungry and furious _poissardes_ proclaiming the arrival of ‘the baker, his wife, and the little apprentice.’ Events of this kind could not but excite uneasiness at any Court, however popular for the time. These shadows were presently succeeded by another, equally undefined, but of a more personal character. In the middle of November, Fanny was told by Miss Planta, in confidence, that Mr. Digby had written to acquaint his royal patrons with his approaching marriage. ‘I believed not a syllable of the matter,’ says the Diary; ‘but I would not tell her that.’ Only a few days later, however, the same kind friend informed Miss Burney that ‘it was all declared, and that the Princesses had wished Miss Gunning joy at the Drawing-Room.’ ‘Now first,’ says Fanny, ‘my belief followed assertion;—but it was only because it was inevitable, since the Princesses could not have proceeded so far without certainty.’ The wedding took place early in January; and from this time the bridegroom appeared no more at Court, which became to one of the attendants an abode of unrelieved gloom.