They told me she was a little prodigy.  She speaks French, Italian, German, better than most natives.  She has a wonderful genius for music, and might make her fortune as a pianist, if it was not made for her otherwise!  I traveled all over Europe; every one told me she was a marvel.  The director of the opera in Paris saw her dance at a child’s party at Spa, and offered me an enormous sum if I would give her up to him and let him have her educated for the ballet.  I said, ’No, I thank you, sir; she is meant to be something finer than a princesse de theatre.’  I had a passionate belief that she might marry absolutely whom she chose, that she might be a princess out and out.  It has never left me till this hour, and I can assure you that it has sustained me in many embarrassments.  Financial, some of them; I don’t mind confessing it!  I have raised money on that girl’s face!  I ’ve taken her to the Jews and bade her put up her veil, and asked if the mother of that young lady was not safe!  She, of course, was too young to understand me.  And yet, as a child, you would have said she knew what was in store for her; before she could read, she had the manners, the tastes, the instincts of a little princess.  She would have nothing to do with shabby things or shabby people; if she stained one of her frocks, she was seized with a kind of frenzy and tore it to pieces.  At Nice, at Baden, at Brighton, wherever we stayed, she used to be sent for by all the great people to play with their children.  She has played at kissing-games with people who now stand on the steps of thrones!  I have gone so far as to think at times that those childish kisses were a sign—­a symbol—­a portent.  You may laugh at me if you like, but have n’t such things happened again and again without half as good a cause, and does n’t history notoriously repeat itself?  There was a little Spanish girl at a second-rate English boarding-school thirty years ago!...  The Empress certainly is a pretty woman; but what is my Christina, pray?  I ’ve dreamt of it, sometimes every night for a month.  I won’t tell you I have been to consult those old women who advertise in the newspapers; you ’ll call me an old imbecile.  Imbecile if you please!  I have refused magnificent offers because I believed that somehow or other—­if wars and revolutions were needed to bring it about—­we should have nothing less than that.  There might be another coup d’etat somewhere, and another brilliant young sovereign looking out for a wife!  At last, however,” Mrs. Light proceeded with incomparable gravity, “since the overturning of the poor king of Naples and that charming queen, and the expulsion of all those dear little old-fashioned Italian grand-dukes, and the dreadful radical talk that is going on all over the world, it has come to seem to me that with Christina in such a position I should be really very nervous.  Even in such a position she would hold her head very high, and if anything should happen to her, she would make no concessions to the popular fury.  The best thing, if one is prudent, seems to be a nobleman of the highest possible rank, short of belonging to a reigning stock.  There you see one striding up and down, looking at his watch, and counting the minutes till my daughter reappears!”