"What is it?" said I to Mary Anne,--"what does she want?" "She's asking where's the Prince; she means papa," whispered Mary Anne to me; and then, in a flash, I saw the way James represented us. "Tell her, my dear," said I, "that the Prince was n't very well, and has gone to bed." But she was too much engaged with us all to ask more about him, and we all sat down to tea, the happiest party ever you looked at. I had time now to look at her; and really, Molly, I must allow, she was the handsomest creature I ever beheld. She was a kind of a Spanish beauty, brown, and with jet-black eyes and hair, but a little vermilion on her cheeks, and eyelashes that threw a shadow over the upper part of her face. As to her teeth, when she smiled,--I thought Mary Anne's good, but they were nothing in comparison. When she caught me looking at her, she seemed to guess what was passing in my mind, for she stooped down and kissed my hand twice or thrice with rapture. It was a great loss to me, as you may suppose, that I could n't speak to her, nor understand what she said to me; but I saw that Mary Anne was charmed with her, and even Cary--cold and distant as she was at first--seemed very much taken with her afterwards. When tea was over, James sat down beside me, and told me everything. "If the governor will only behave handsomely for a week or two," said he,--"I ask no more,--that lovely creature and four thousand a year are all my own." He went on to show me that we ought to live in a certain style--not looking too narrowly into the cost of it--while she was with us. "She can't stay after the fourteenth," said he, "for her uncle the Cardinal is to be at Pisa that day, and she must be there to meet him; so that, after all, it's only three weeks I 'm asking for, and a couple of hundred pounds will do it all. As for me," said he, "I'm regularly aground,--haven't a ten-pound note remaining, and had to sell my 'drag' and my four grays at Milan, to get money to come on here." He then informed me that her saddle-horses would arrive in a day or two, and that we should immediately provide others, to enable him and the girls to ride out with her. "She is used to every imaginable luxury," said he, "and has no conception that want of means could be the impediment to having anything one wished for." I promised him to do my best with his father, Molly: but you may guess what a task that was; for, say what I could, the only remark I could get out of him was, "It's very strange that he never went to London."