We had been kept very close--ready to move. Of course we had none of the anxieties of the Admiral, but when things are going ill the atmosphere of a whole ship will get affected. And we could see that things had been going mightily ill; and the talk was not of a merry fight, such as we had had at the Nile, but of our being squeezed out of the Mediterranean by the slowness and treachery and cowardice and folly of one ally after another, and the coming of a French fleet into the Mediterranean, and the Admiral being unable to wait and fight it, because Commodore Duckworth would not come down from Minorca. And the Admiral had been miserably fretful and out of spirits, and more sea-sick than we had ever known him. And Will, poor fellow, had been ill at ease too, because of the non-furtherance of his suit to Donna Rusidda, the meaning of whose continued deafness he could not understand, because she ever seemed well disposed to him, and glad to see him, and gentle to his caresses. But of their marriage, which he and her brother the Prince desired so earnestly, she would hear nothing, though she was pleased to have him urge it with the best force he could. My Lady had a palace on the Marina, some way beyond the palace of the Prince of Butera, the Sicilian noble who had most influence with the Queen, and nearer to the Flora, as they call the extraordinarily fine public garden, full of various kinds of palms, and of fountains of white marble shaded with the papyrus. After we had dined, and the beautiful Sicilian summer night had fallen, with the heavens so starlit that you could make out the sapphire blueness of the sky, and with the air soft as silk, we drove in the Embassy coaches up and down the Marina, where it is the custom of the modish in Palermo to assemble on warm nights. After a little we got down, and went with the Admiral and My Lady to the kiosk, where there was music, and all the _beau monde_ eating what they call in this part "ices"--a kind of cream iced and flavoured with fruit, so shaped and coloured as to almost exactly resemble the fruit from which it is flavoured. Will was mightily offended by the _padrone_, who, perceiving that he understood Italian, cautioned him not to be taken in in the same way as some English sailor who had patronised the kiosk, and, taking an ice orange for a veritable orange, had bitten off half of it with the result of an outrageous toothache, and a knock-down for the waiter. Will did not say whether the cause of his dudgeon was that he conceived the landlord to have confused him with a common sailor, or because the landlord did not perceive at a glance that he was one of those to whom it is an instinct not to make a social mistake.