Mrs. Lord Seymour Rossiter has been in Europe more than eighteen months, and has seen every thing worth seeing, and has gotten as far on her journey home as London, where she is stopping at the Grand Hotel, and has a suite of rooms, and a French maid, and a German nurse for the little Paul born a year ago in Florence, and who is never to speak a word of English until he has mastered both German and French. Major Rossiter is there, too, and plays whist, and smokes, and reads the papers, and goes to his banker’s, and talks to his valet whom he employs, he scarcely knows why, except that Anna wishes him to do so.
Anna is very stylish, and grand, and foreign, and is high up in art, and castles, and ruins and knows all about Claude Lorraine and Murillo. She breakfasts in bed and lunches at two, and drives from five to six in Hyde Park, where her haughty face, and showy dress, and elegant turn-out attract almost as much attention as does the princess herself. Yesterday afternoon I paid my penny for a chair, and sitting down watched the gay pageant as it went by, and saw her in it, the gayest of them all, with her red parasol over her head and her white poodle dog in her lap. And when I thought of her past, and of Queenie and Margery, whose lives had been so full of romance, I said to myself: “Truly, there are events in real life stranger far than any recorded in fiction.”
And so, with the summer rain falling softly upon the flowers and shrubs beneath my window, and the sun trying to break through the clouds which hang so darkly over England’s great metropolis, I finish this story of Queenie.
London, July, 1880.
THE END.
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