The bonnet would not fix in its place.

At last she sank down crying in a chair, and was all brown silk, and said that how to appear before a parcel of dreadful men, and perhaps a live duke into the bargain, was more than she knew, and more than could be expected of a lone widow woman.

'Not for worlds!' she answered my petition to accompany her.

She would not, she said, have me go to my papa there for anything on earth; my papa would perish at the sight of me; I was not even to wish to go.

And then she exclaimed, 'Oh, the blessed child's poor papa!' and that people were cruel to him, and would never take into account his lovely temper, and that everybody was his enemy, when he ought to be sitting with the highest in the land.