visitor, but not equally so for his intimates, who had probably heard those stories a hundred times over. After every sentence almost he would ask, in Italian, 'Do you understand?' His young wife laughed heartily at the story of his dressing up in woman's clothes." A dull, garrulous husband, boring people with stories of which they were sick; a childish little wife, trying to make the best of things, and laughing over the stale old jokes; this is what may be called the idyllic moment in the wedded life of Charles Edward and Louise. What would she have felt, that strong, calm lady, growing old far off in the Isle of Skye, had she been able to see what Bonstetten saw; had she heard the Count and Countess of Albany laughing, the one with the laughter of an old sot, the other with the laughter of a giddy child, over the adventures of that heroic Prince Charlie whose memory was safe in her heart as the sheets he had slept in were safe in her closet, waiting to be her grave-clothes? Forty-four years later, when the Queen of Hearts was a stout, dowdy old lady, with no traces of beauty, and himself a flighty, amiable old gossip of seventy, Karl Victor von Bonstetten wrote to the Countess of Albany from Rome: "I never pass through the Apostles' square without looking up at that balcony, at that house where I saw you for the first time." CHAPTER IV. THE HEIR. In 1765 Horace Walpole, mentioning the now-ascertained fact of the Pretender's abjuration of Catholicism, informed his friend Mann that a rumour was about that Charles Edward had declared his intention of never marrying, in order that no more Stuarts should remain to embroil England. This magnanimous resolution, which was a mere repetition of an answer made years ago by the Pretender's father, did not hold good against the temptations of the Cabinet of Versailles. There is something particularly disgusting in the thought that, merely because the French Government thought it convenient to keep a Stuart in reserve with whom, if necessary, to trip up England, the once magnanimous Charles Edward consented to marry in consideration of a certain pension from Versailles; to make money out of any possible or probable son he might have. This, however, was the plain state of the case; and Louise of Stolberg had been selected, and married to a drunkard old enough to be her father, merely that this honourable bargain between the man outraged in 1748, and the Government which had outraged him, might be satisfactorily fulfilled.