“What?” she cried. She was now on her feet. “You have done it for me—all for me? The hospital to be built at Chelsea! Oh, my liege!”
“Now the other paper,” said the King.
She took it from him.
“Ah, Royal Letters Patent—our boy—our Charlie—Duke of St. Albans! Oh, my liege—my King—my love forever!” She sank on her knees, and, catching his hand, covered it with kisses—with kisses and tears.
KITTY CLIVE, ACTRESS
At the King's Head Inn at Thatcham on the Bath Road a post chaise drew up, but with no great flourish, for the postilion knew that his only passenger was a lady, and he had no intention of pulling his horses on their haunches merely for the sake of impressing a lady. In his youth he had made many flourishes of such a type, but had failed to win an extra crown from a traveller of this sex.
The groom, who advanced with some degree of briskness from the stable-yard, became more languid in his movements when he perceived that only a lady was descending from the chaise. He knew that briskness on the part of a groom never caused a coin to spring from the purse of a lady. The landlord, however, taking a more hopeful view of the harvest prospects of the solitary lady as a guest—he had lived in London, and had heard of assignations in which the (temporarily) solitary lady became a source of profit to the inn-keeper—made a pretence of bustling out to assist the occupant of the chaise to alight, bowing elaborately when he perceived that the lining of her travel-ling-cloak was of quilted silk, and once again as she tripped very daintily over the cobble-stones in front of the King's Head, and smiled very bewitchingly within the satin frame of her hood. The landlord had a notion that he had seen her face and her smile before. He carried with him the recollection of a good many faces and smiles within the frame-work of quilted satin hoods.
“Madam, you honour my poor house,” he said in his best London manner as the lady passed through the porch. “'T is rarely that a person of your ladyship's quality—”