'It was because the Duke married a dairymaid,' I replied, always tossing
up my chin at that. My father had concocted the questions and prepared
me for the responses, but the effect was striking, both upon his visitors
and the landlady's. Gradually my ear grew accustomed to her invariable
whisper on these occasions. 'Blood Rile,' she said; and her friends all
said 'No!' like the run of a finger down a fiddlestring.

A gentleman of his acquaintance called on him one evening to take him out
for a walk. My father happened to be playing with me when this gentleman
entered our room: and he jumped up from his hands and knees, and abused
him for intruding on his privacy, but afterwards he introduced him to me
as Shylock's great-great-great-grandson, and said that Shylock was
satisfied with a pound, and his descendant wanted two hundred pounds,
or else all his body: and this, he said, came of the emigration of the
family from Venice to England. My father only seemed angry, for he went
off with Shylock's very great grandson arm-in-arm, exclaiming, 'To the
Rialto!' When I told Mrs. Waddy about the visitor, she said, 'Oh, dear!
oh, dear! then I'm afraid your sweet papa won't return very soon, my
pretty pet.' We waited a number of days, until Mrs. Waddy received a
letter from him. She came full-dressed into my room, requesting me to
give her twenty kisses for papa, and I looked on while she arranged her
blue bonnet at the glass. 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