Charles the First had rested his
weary head upon those very pillows, before he went on to the Inn at
Uxbridge, where he was to be lodged less luxuriously. James the Second
had stayed there when Duke of York, with Mistress Anne Hyde, before he
acknowledged his marriage to the multitude; and Anne's daughter had
occupied the same room as Queen of England forty years later; and now
the Royal Chamber, with adjacent dressing-room, and oratory, and
spacious boudoir all in the same suite, was reserved for Lady Lesbia
Haselden.
'I'm afraid you are spoiling me,' she told Mr. Smithson, when he asked
if she approved of the rooms that had been allotted to her. 'I feel
quite ashamed of myself among the ghosts of dead and gone queens.'
'Why so? Surely the Royalty of beauty has as divine a right as that of
an anointed sovereign.'
'I hope the Royal personages don't walk,' exclaimed Lady Kirkbank, in
her girlish tone; 'this is just the house in which one would expect
ghosts.'
Whereupon Mrs. Mostyn hastened to enlighten the company upon the real
causes of ghost-seeing, which she had lately studied in Carpenter's
'Mental Physiology,' and favoured them with a diluted version of the
views of that authority.
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