"As you will," she said; and there we stood drawn up, solemnly guarding the door through which our new comrade's body had been carried, and watching in an interested way the unloading of the present of wine which the King had sent to My Lady. By-and-by, when it was all finished, the priest went out, and, finding the flare signal removed, gave the order for us to proceed on our way to the little graveyard at Pausilippo, where we buried our comrade with the usual rites; after which we marched down to our church with the green and yellow dome, every one of us, I believe, thoroughly disappointed that some alarm had not arisen to make the priest-fellow with his big purple-studded cross give us the signal to whip out our cutlasses from under our cloaks in the Black-eyed Susan style. However, no such incident happened, and we stepped into the little church, and resigned our positions in the guild, and stepped out again without attracting particular notice; and we went on board our boat, which I remarked was the launch, with a carronade in the bows, and so to the ship. The next day Will and I received a hint that our presence at the Palace was not desirable; My Lady, who was a born plotter, very probably conceiving that something might leak out from our conversation. At any rate she bade us come up to the Embassy in the afternoon and dine with her--a mark of graciousness which suggested to our disappointed minds that she had had two fingers in the pie. I was glad enough. It outraged my dignity when she kissed me once at the banquet after our day at Pompeji; and at other times she had made me look foolish in public; but in her own palace it was indeed a privilege to be near this woman whose beauty and engagingness I have never seen equalled. Her whole attitude was so frankly caressing--I do not mean in the matter of actual embraces, but in the gracious warmth and unrestrained naturalness of the bearing with which she treated all around her, as if they had been the members of her actual family. But Will could barely be civil to her. Donna Rusidda's dislike may have been reflected in him, though I suspect that it was more his resenting My Lady's influence over the Admiral. Not, I believe, that at this time he had the smallest suspicion of any improprieties between them, or even that her attitude to the Admiral was more familiar than it was to any of us, whom she might at the moment be patronising in her airy way. It was more an innocent air of patronage to him, the familiarity of addressing him as "Nelson," the dragging him in her train to this or that rout, as if he were an ordinary gentleman about town proud to have the escorting of a beautiful woman. Will would have liked to have seen the same distance between the Admiral and her as there was between the Admiral and his officers--a distance which, even in one so genial, the discipline of the Service made very marked. Not even Captain Troubridge, who had been his shipmate for five-and-twenty