indeed, since your accession to fortune,
she has discovered some very amiable and some especially attractive
qualities in your nature, and that if you fall amongst the right
people--I hope you appreciate the sort of accident intended--you will
become a very superior article. Bella is, as always, a sincere friend;
and though Alice says, nothing, she does not look ungrateful to him
who speaks well of you. Bella has told me in confidence--mind, in
confidence--that all is broken off between Alice and you, and says it
is all the better for both; that you were a pair of intractable tempers,
and that the only chance for either of you is to be allied to somebody
or something that would consent to think you perfection, and yet manage
you as if you were not what is called 'absolute wisdom.'

"Bella also said, 'Tony might have had some chance with Alice had he
remained poor; the opposition of her family would have had its weight
in influencing her in his favor; but now that he is a prize in the
matrimonial lottery, she is quite ready to see any defects he may have,
and set them against all that would be said in his behalf. Last of all,
she likes her independence as a widow. I half suspected that Maitland
had been before you in her favor; but Bella says not. By the way, it
was the fortune that has fallen to you Maitland had always expected;
Sir Omerod having married, or, as some say, not married, his mother, and
adopted Maitland, who contrived to spend about eighty thousand of the
old man's savings in ten or eleven years. He is a strange fellow, and
mysterious to the last. Since the overthrow of the Government, we have
been reduced to ask protection to the city from the secret society
called the Camorra, a set of Neapolitan Thugs, who cut throats in
reciprocity; and it was by a guard of these wretches that we were
escorted to the ship's boats when we embarked. Bella swears that the
chief of the gang was no other than Maitland, greatly disguised, of
course; but she says that she recognized him by his teeth as he smiled
accidentally. It would be, of course, at the risk of his life he was
there, since anything that pertained to the Court would, if discovered,
be torn to fragments by the people. My 'godfather' had a narrow escape
on Tuesday last. He rode through the Toledo in full uniform, amidst all
the people, who were satisfied with hissing him instead of treating him
to a stiletto, and the rascal grinned an insolent defiance as he w