Soon Donna Rusidda came down--beautiful, tender, and repentant; and when I sought to make my _adieux_ to such a painful situation, inquired if I would take a note to Will. Thinking it might be to give him the news he so courted, I joyfully assented, and we all three walked up to the palace and into the salon with the silk hangings where she had first received us, and off the end of which there was a little room, into which she retired. The Prince, taking me by the arm, walked me to the other end. He was much agitated. "My sister," he said, "is changeable. That she has refused to marry your friend, the match upon which I have set my heart, is certain; and yet I am equally certain that she loves him, for she cannot conceal her joy when she is going with Her Majesty on board his ship, or to any party where your Admiral and his suite will be. I can see that there is much tenderness between them. She allows him the liberty which neither she nor I would tolerate in any other man; and yet she must have refused him, and I think roughly. It cannot be," he resumed presently, "that she fears and forgets the tradition of our house, lest the prophecy should be fulfilled." "Ah," he continued with evident relief, as she came into the room again, carrying a letter, and with her face glowing with tenderness: "she has repented. Go, my friend, and take it from her. The word which accompanies a letter is often a key to it." Seeing me advance, she halted, and, when I came up, I looked in her dark shining eyes. "'Tis a letter to Signor Hardres," she said, "bidding him to come again soon, and be sure to bring the Admiral with him. There is no one to whom the immortal Nelson listens as he listens to Signor Hardres; and it is the desire of my heart that the hero should pass one night underneath this fast-decaying roof." Her brother, who had been watching for her expression to tell him when she had finished what she most desired to say, then joined us; and she told him that she had been writing to Will to use his influence to win the Admiral to honour their roof by sleeping under it. "You should have asked my Lady Hamilton," he rejoined: "'tis the Ambassador's wife who orders where the Admiral goes." The Princess shrugged her shoulders. "There is no disgrace; it is common courtesy, if you wish to invite a guest who is staying with others, to do it through his hostess." "I will not," she said briefly. "It makes my blood boil even to see him with her." "Rusidda!" he cried protestingly. "Oh, have you no eyes?" she asked, in a voice that was strangely, and it seemed to me unnecessarily, touched with emotion. "Oh yes, of course I have," he continued impatiently. And neither saw that their words were double-edged.