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.

The Court of Versailles wasted its money: the officially-negotiated baby
was never born. Nay, Sir Horace Mann, the English Minister at Florence,
whose spies watched every movement of the Count and Countess of Albany,
was able to report to his Government, in answer to a vague rumour of the
coming of an heir, that the wife of Charles Edward Stuart had never, at
any moment, had any reasons for expecting to become a mother. And when,
in the first years of this century, Henry Benedict, Cardinal York, the
younger brother of Charles Edward, was buried where the two melancholy
genii of Canova keep watch in St. Peter's, opposite to the portrait of
Maria Clementina Sobieska in powder and paint and patches, a certain
solemn feel