“Oh, Greville, and do we see you once more? Sir William and me was longing for this hour. Take his other hand, Sir William, and then it will be the three of us again.”
She put his hand in his uncle’s, and beamed upon both as gay and innocent as a lamb in a May meadow. There was no speck of cloud in the untroubled deeps of the eyes he remembered so well, nothing but happiness. He took the hand and kissed it.
“What am I to call your Lady Hamilton?” said he, smiling at his uncle.
“Emma—what else? She is not changed in heart, Greville. But look at her and see what Italy has done!”
“What you have done!” she corrected gravely, and stood with dropped hands at attention to be viewed.
But Greville’s keen eyes had already drawn their conclusion. “More beautiful,” they told him, “more womanly; dignity and elegance at her command to be used like her cachemire when necessary, and laid aside for the old free-and-easy when she relaxed. Younger looking than even her four and twenty years—the bud unfolded into perfect beauty, the blossomed rose.”
Sir William looked much older. The journey had wearied him and the wild round of gaiety in London teased him. He wanted respite and could not get it, for every fashionable in the town was wild to see the coming Ambassadress, and it is possible that even Emma herself might have been daunted if she could have guessed the stories with which the blank if not the virgin pages of her early life were adorned. Hamilton knew them. Despairing friends plucked at the skirts of his garment at the last moment, with these legends, to save him from a fate impossible for an ambassador. He sickened of London and longed for Naples and the sunshine.
“You have seen the King?” Greville asked, when they had talked a while.
“Certainly. He was most gracious. I am given a privy councillorship. Emma, my love, have you forgot your appointment with Romney?”
She hesitated a second, invisibly, to all but Greville’s keenness, then stooped and kissed Sir William’s cheek.