“You are to know, sir,” she began, “that I have been from my childhood in the service of the king’s daughter, the princess Ginevra.  I grew up with her; I was held in bonour, and I led a happy life, till it pleased the cruel passion of love to envy me my condition, and make me think that there was no being on earth to be compared to the Duke of Albany.  He pretended to love me so much, that, in return, I loved him with all my heart.  Unable, by degrees, to refuse him anything, I let him into the palace at night, nay, into the room which of all others the princess regarded as most exclusively her own; for there she kept her jewels, and there she was accustomed to sleep during inclement states of the weather.  It communicated with the other sleeping-room by a covered gallery, which looked out to some lonely ruins; and nobody ever passed that way, day or night.

“Our intercourse continued for several months; and, finding that I placed all my happiness in obliging him, he ventured to disclose to me one day a design he had upon the princess’s hand; nay, did not blush to ask my assistance in furthering it.  Judge how I set his wishes above my own, when I confess that I undertook to do so.  It is true, his rank was nearer to the princess’s than to mine; and he pretended that he sought the alliance merely on that account; protesting that he should love me more than ever, and that Ginevra would be little better than his wife in name.  But, God knows, I did it wholly out of the excess of my desire to please him.

“Day and night I exerted all my endeavours to recommend him to the princess.  Heaven is my witness that I did it in real earnest, however wrong it was.  But my labour was to no purpose, for she was in love herself.  She returned in all its warmth the passion of a most accomplished and valiant gentleman, who had come into Scotland with a younger brother from Italy, and who had made himself such a favourite with every body, my lover included, that the king himself had bestowed on him titles and estates, and put him on a footing with the greatest lords of the land.

“Unfortunately, the princess not only turned a deaf ear to all I said in the duke’s favour, but grew to dislike him in proportion to my recommendation; so that, finding there was no likelihood of his success, his own love was secretly turned into hate and rage.  He studied, little as I dreamt he could be so base, how he could best destroy her prospect of happiness.  He resorted, for this purpose, to a most crafty expedient, which I, poor fool, took for nothing but what he feigned it to be.  He pretended that a whim had come into his head for seeming to prosper in his suit, out of a kind of revenge for his not being able to do so in reality; and, in order to indulge this whim, he requested me to dress myself in the identical clothes which the princess put off when she went to bed that night, and then to appear in them at my usual post in the balcony, and so let down the ladder as though I were her very self, and receive him into my arms.