When it was over, Windham approached her, and ‘in a tone of very deep concern, and with a look that fully concurred in it,’ said, ‘Do I see Miss Burney? Indeed,’ he went on, ‘I was going to make a speech not very gallant.’ ‘But it is what I should like better,’ cried the lady; ‘for it is kind, if you were going to say I look miserably ill, as that is but a necessary consequence of feeling so, and miserably ill I have felt this long time past.’ She prevented more by going on to say how happy she was that he had been absent from the Managers’ Box, and had not joined in the attempt made by his fellow-managers to disconcert Mr. Hastings. ‘Indeed, I was kept in alarm to the very last moment; for at every figure I saw start up just now—Mr. Fox, Mr. Burke, Mr. Grey—I concluded yours would be the next.’ ‘You were prepared, then,’ cried he with no little malice, ‘for a “voice issuing from a distant pew.”’ This unexpected quotation from Cecilia “put me quite out,” says Fanny, “whereupon he seized his opportunity to put himself in. For, after a little laugh at his victory, he very gravely, and even almost solemnly, said, ‘But there is another subject—always uppermost with me—which I have not ventured to speak of to you; though to others you know not how I have raved and raged! But I believe, I am sure, you know what I allude to.’ ’Twas impossible, thus challenged, to dissemble. ‘Yes,’ I answered; ‘I own, I believe I understand you; and, indeed, I should be tempted to say further—if you would forget it when heard, and make no implications— that, from what has come round to me from different quarters, I hold myself to be very much obliged to you....’ When we came home I was immediately summoned to her Majesty, to whom I gave a full and fair account of all I had heard of the defence; and it drew tears from her expressive eyes, as I repeated Mr. Hastings’ own words, upon the hardship and injustice of the treatment he had sustained.” At night, the reporter was called upon to repeat her narrative to the King, to whom she was equally faithful, “sparing nothing of what had dropped from the persecuted defendant relative to the Ministers of the Crown.” Two days afterwards came the King’s birthday, and Miss Burney was well enough to enjoy a lively scene—the last that she was to witness at Court: