It was a very dark and bitter one to me from the moment of his revelations. So, she could be independent of me, and happy in her independence! What a world of hypocrisy and double-dealing was exposed in this her easy repudiation of my claims upon her! During all these years that I had counted her my slave, she had been nursing her schemes of treachery--been manœuvring, probably, to make me the instrument of her conveyance to her lover’s arms. And now, no doubt, they were laughing over their outwitting of me. Well, who laughs last laughs best. One day I had a notable visit. Two ladies, walking through the grounds, came upon me where I was seated in a grove of myrtle. One was Lady Hamilton, very great and gorgeous in a shell-shaped hat _de sparterie_, trimmed with butterflies and a violet ribbon knotted under one ear; while the other, whom I did not know, a dowdy, ignoble old figure with watery eyes, wore a plain _fichu-chemise_, and an immense bonnet with a veil thrown back over it. They both stopped upon seeing me, and Lady Hamilton beckoned. I rose, advanced, and curtsied. “Here, your Majesty,” said my friend, “is the very person herself.” Her Majesty! I paled and trembled; then ventured a glance from under my lashes. Sure I was not to blame for my remissness. I vow I could have thought my lady had brought her monthly nurse with her for an airing in the country. The poor woman looked steeped in caudle, flocky with child-beds, and no wonder. In some two dozen years out of her forty-five or so she had borne near as many children. She had prayed for an heir, and Heaven had sent her a tempest. The eternal lyings-in had soured her temper, which was not further improved by neuralgia and opium. Nursing, as she did, outside her litter, a perpetual ambition to wear the breeches of government, it had been characteristically mean of her husband to adopt this method to correct it. Yet, in spite of all she had borne both from and to her lord, her vigour remained unquenchable. Indeed, in a kingdom which annually abandoned some twenty-five thousand babies to the foundlings, a child was the cheapest present one could make to one’s favourite of the moment. Yet, as I saw her now, she was the farthest from imposing or attractive. Her legs were short, and her upper lip so long that her nose stood nearer her forehead than her chin, on the former of which she wore a single fat curl like a clock-spring. She put a hand to it two or three times, before she addressed me, very quick and hoarse, in French. “_Maria! Mais elle fait une bonne mine à mauvais jeu!_ Come hither, child. So this is our redoubtable little _moucharde_? We have need of her in these days of the devil’s advocacy.”