, unlike that, Alfieri has not thought fit to
suppress, marked their departure from England. As Alfieri, who had
preceded the Countess by a few minutes to see whether the luggage had
been properly stored on the ship at Dover, turned to go and meet her,
his eyes suddenly fell with a start of recognition upon a woman standing
on the landing-place. She was not young, but still very handsome, as
some of us may know her from Gainsborough's portrait; and she was no
other than Penelope Lady Ligonier, for whom Alfieri had been so mad
twenty years before, for whom he had fought his famous duel in St.
James' Park, and got himself disgracefully mixed up in a peculiarly
disgraceful divorce suit. He had several times inquired after her, and
always in vain; and now he would scarcely have believed his eyes had his
former mistress not given him a smile of recognition. Alfieri was
terribly upset. The sight of this ghost from out of a disgraceful past,
coming to haunt what he considered a dignified present, seems fairly to
have terrified him; he ran back into the ship and dared not go to meet
Mme. d'Albany, lest in so doing he should meet Lady Ligonier. Presently,
Mme. d'Albany came on board. With the indifference of a woman of the
world, of that easy-goingness which was rapidly effacing in her the
romantic victim of Charles Edward, she told Alfieri that the friends
who had escorted her to the ship (and who appear to have perfectly
understood the temper of the Countess) had pointed out his former flame
and entertained her with a brief biography of her predecessor in
Alfieri's heart. Mme. d'Albany took it all as a matter of course: she
was probably no longer at all in love with Alfieri, but she admired his
genius and character as much and more than ever; and was probably
beginning to develop a certain good-natured, half-motherly acquiescence
in his eccentricities, such as women who have suffered much, and grown
stout and strong, and cynically optimistic now that suffering is over,
are apt to develop towards people accustomed to resort to them, like
sick children, in all their ups and downs of temper.

"Between us," says Alfieri, "there was never any falsehood, or reticence,
or coolness, or quarrel";--and, indeed, when a woman, such as Mme.
d'Albany must have been at the age of forty, has once determined to
adore and humour a particular individual in every single possible thing,
all such painful results of more sensitive passion naturally b