my kindest regards to your father; and
think you had best see as little as possible of your bouillotte-playing
French friend and his friends. This advice I know you will follow, as
young men always follow the advice of their seniors and well-wishers.
I dine in Fitzroy Square to-day with the pretty widow and her daughter,
and am yours always, dear Clive, A. P."

CHAPTER XXIII. In which we hear a Soprano and a Contralto

The most hospitable and polite of Colonels would not hear of Mrs.
Mackenzie and her daughter quitting his house when he returned to it,
after six weeks' pleasant sojourn in Paris; nor, indeed, did his fair
guest show the least anxiety or intention to go away. Mrs. Mackenzie had
a fine merry humour of her own. She was an old soldier's wife, she
said and knew when her quarters were good; and I suppose, since her
honeymoon, when the captain took her to Harrogate and Cheltenham,
stopping at the first hotels, and travelling in a chaise-and-pair the
whole way, she had never been so well off as in that roomy mansion near
Tottenham Court Road. Of her mother's house at Musselburgh she gave a
ludicrous but dismal account. "Eh, James," she said, "I think if you had
come to mamma, as you threatened, you would not have staid very long.
It's a wearisome place. Dr. M'Craw boards with her; and it's sermon and
psalm-singing from morning till night. My little Josey takes kindly to
the life there, and I left her behind, poor little darling! It was not
fair to bring three of us to take possession of your house, dear James;
but my poor little Rosey was just withering away there. It's good for
the dear child to see the world a little, and a kind uncle, who is not
afraid of us now he sees us, is he?" Kind Uncle James was not at all
afraid of little Rosey; whose pretty face and modest manners, and sweet
songs, and blue eyes, cheered and soothed the old bachelor. Nor was
Rosey's mother less agreeable and pleasant. She had married the captain
(it was a love-match, against the will of her parents, who had destined
her to be the third wife of old Dr. M'Mull) when very young. Many
sorrows she had had, including poverty, the captain's imprisonment for
debt, and his demise; but she was of a gay and lightsome spirit. She
was but three-and-thirty years old, and looked five-and-twenty. She was
active, brisk, jovial, and alert; and so good-looking, that it was a
wonder she had not taken a successor to Captain Mackenzie. James Binni