The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 239: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER XXII THE YOUNG PRINCESS On the same evening and at about the same hour that the preceding scene took place on Westminster Bridge, the Princess Charlotte was passing through an ordeal of con- siderable mental excitement at Windsor Castle. Retiring soon after ten o’clock to her own chamber, she dismissed her attendant ladies and sat down to pen a long letter to her mother. For it will be remembered that the Princess Sophia had, on the previous day, undertaken to write to Jocelyn Loftus and beseech him to pay an immediate visit to London, that she might hold a con- sultation with him relative to the conspiracy then on foot against the Princess of Wales. Now the young Princess Charlotte hoped, with the sanguine fervour that was natural to her age, not only that her aunt’s letter would find Jocelyn at Canterbury, but that he would pay immediate attention to it by hurrying up to London, and that he would thence set off to Italy to warn the persecuted Princess Caroline of her danger. In this case Jocelyn might become the bearer of a letter from the young Princess Charlotte to her injured mother, — not a mere letter which she would be compelled to write guardedly and in such a manner as to exempt it from the chance of suppression, but a letter wherein she might give free vent to all the filial fondness that she experi- enced toward the being who gave her birth. The composition of this letter occupied the princess upwards of an hour, and as she laid down her pen the time- piece on the mantel chimed eleven. The night was tem- pestuous, gusts of wind swept around the old towers of the palatial castle, and the rain was from time to time driven forcibly against the window-panes. The young princess 210 ECORNIELOOOKS EO)