person than the Lady Abbess, who ceremoniously informed the Count that
she was unable to let him in, as his wife had sought an asylum in her
convent under the protection of Her Highness the Grand Duchess of
Tuscany.

Sir Horace Mann says that Alfieri, who is not mentioned in the very
circumstantial narrative of Dutens, was hanging about the convent,
in order to prevent the Pretender, who always carried pistols in his
pockets, from committing any violence. This seems extremely unlikely,
as the first use to which Charles Edward would naturally have put
his pistols would have been shooting Alfieri, for whose murder he
immediately offered a thousand sequins. At any rate, raging like a
maniac, the discomfited husband went back to his empty house.

It would be pretty and pathetic to insert in this part of my narrative a
page of half-condemnatory condolence with Charles Edward. But this I
find it perfectly impossible to do. Of course, if we call to mind
Falkirk and Skye, if we conjure up in our fancy the Prince Charlie who
still lived in the thoughts of Flora MacDonald, there is something very
frightful in this tragi-comic flight of the Countess of Albany: the
slamming of that convent door in his face is the worst injury, the worst
injustice, the worst ignominy reserved by fate for the last of the
unhappy Stuarts.

But of the Charles Edward of the Forty-five there remained so little in
this Count of Albany that we have no right to consider them any longer
as one individual, to condone the brutishness of the Count of Albany for
the sake of the chivalry of Prince Charles, to degrade our conception of
the young man by tacking on to it the just ignominy inflicted upon the
old man, the man who had inherited his name and position, but scarcely
his personality. Above all, we have no right to add to whatever reproaches
we may think fit to shower upon the Countess of Albany and on Alfieri,
the imaginary reproach that the husband whose rights they were violating
was the victor of Gladsmuir and Falkirk.

There must always be something which shocks us in the behaviour,
however otherwise innocent and decorous, of a woman who runs away
from her husband with the assistance of her lover; but this quality of
offensiveness is not, in such a case as the present one, a fault of
the woman: it is one of her undeserved misfortunes, as much as is the
bad treatment, the solitude, the temptation, to which she has been
subjected. The evil practice