The Story of the Queen

IN TWO PARTS. PART ONE.

THE young Queen lay dying in her palace. All the city held its breath in the night. One fancied that every -wind blowing up from the Shore of Shadow might bear upon it the last sigh of this young mother of her people, this young mother of a son born to reign one day in her stead. And that day might be to-morrow. And if the child died, too, then either a ruler as foreign as that of the great power now reaching out its mailed hand to grasp the small kingdom ; or else revolution, anarchy, one knew not what.

But it was not of this that the people thought. Their feeling -was for the young creature who, if she symbolized to them all there was of power and majesty, symbolized also the fullness of romance, and, in an abstract way, the ideal of their country.

Couriers from other courts went and came with dispatches concerning the Queen’s condition; far out on lonely farms in dark fields, the dwellers waked and waited ; and in the capital city men gathered in groups, and women wandered up and down the streets unregarded, reading the bulletins. The last had said that Her Majesty appeared to be sinking. And all went about silently, and met one another as if looking in the face of dread calamity.

Down on the Shore of Shadow, at the foot of the great lake, the long, low palace, with its marble porticoes, wrapped in the blue bloom of the night, gleamed white here and there in the moon that silvered a swale of the dark waters, and threw a dewy glory over the hills, whose billowing greenery embowered it not as if they contrasted the vastness of Nature with the most that art and beauty could do, but as if Nature gave the place her shelter and protection.

The moon, grown low and golden, moved slowly down behind the hills and left the world in dusky mystery. The lights had shone steadily in the palace all night. In the extinguishing of a greater light perhaps they had been forgotten; their pale flames would still be shining white against the dawn, and till the sun came kindling the green heights and bringing with it the wind that would toss leaf and bough and twinkling dews, and make the morning riot of life and light and fragrance and song a mockery of the hush in the ante-room where the chamberlains waited, and of the stillness in the great chamber where, in an occasional long, gasping sigh, physicians and nurses saw the only token of life in the form that lay sunken and sinking lower among the pillows.

It was a far cry from this palace, which once had seemed to her a place of all delight, which seemed so yet to many of those who saw it like the mirage of some floating dream of beauty at the foot of the inland sea, a far cry to the old castle in the hill-country where the young Queen had spent her earlier years. She was the Princess Adria in those happy days, — so remote a cousin of the King, with so many lives between her and the throne, that she was half forgotten, and her title, although long descended, was almost a travesty. The castle itself was the remnant of an old structure of the dark ages, a ruin in its larger portion. But in the south towers, on their crag overhanging the villages below, there was space and to spare for a certain pleasant life, not without some state and ceremonial in her father’s time, —small state, for the revenue was small. And after his death there was little other appanage than the Directress and the governesses, and the companion of her studies and her pleasures, — the Baroness Dalma, who was her other self.

Here the two children wondered and frolicked, lived and learned, and from their balcony saw the sun spring over the edge of the earth as if only to bring them day, saw the clouds gather about the Moon and lead her up the sky, like a bride with her floating veil about her. Here they tamed the birds and hares, and wandered in the pleasaunces where for a thousand years the ladies of the castle had wandered before them. Here they overlooked the movement of the villages beneath, and now and then questioned of the life down there; and impatient of their own eventless day, made their escapades by the path winding between the rocks and beside the waterfalls, and went about the streets full of not half-concealed joy, and talked with wayfarer and householder, and back to their postern, neither village nor castle folk the wiser.

It was in one of these escapades that they found old Nana. She was staggering on her way under a huge bundle of fagots, her wind-blown rags, her face as wrinkled as a fungus, making her seem like the creation of a wizard fancy, It happened, as they reached her, that the withes fell apart and the fagots scattered on the ground.

For a second they looked about for some one to help her, — they who hardly picked up their own book if it fell. And then they sprang to her assistance and gathered the sticks and bound them in two bundles, which, with much merriment, they put on their own shoulders.

“ Goodness of Heaven! ” cried Dalma, after a few steps. “And she carries them all! ”

“And would they were more ! ” croaked the old woman in her but halfdistinguishable dialect.

“You have been robbing the woods of the castle ! ” cried Dalma gayly, suddenly turning on her.

“The castle,” said the old woman, “has robbed me and mine since time began for us! ”

“The castle — has robbed ” — began Adria, reddening with the start that such words gave her, and halting between the instantaneous sensations of surprise and anger, of possible shame, of unintended insolence. For nothing like such accusation had ever before met the ears of the little princess.

“You mean ” — she began.

“ Come and see what I mean I ” exclaimed the old woman, looking them over with a quick, sharp glance. And she shouldered the fagots that Dalma had thrown down, while the pretty baroness ran and put her shoulder also under the one that the princess had not yet cast off. And so they followed the old woman into the wood, and after a little stayed their steps at a hut no better than the huts of the charcoal-burners deeper in the forest, and that at first glance was only an ill-built mound of thatch. The old woman threw down her load, bidding them drop their own, and pushing the door open, motioned them to enter. Coming out of the light, the interior was at first mere darkness. Then they discerned a peasant, unshorn, unkempt, glowering in a corner of the hearth. “Mad,” said the old woman, “mad with trouble.”

A child, plainly an idiot, lay in the other corner, on the earthen floor; a young woman, plaiting straw, rolled him to and fro with her foot. A little boy, half-clothed in a rag of some sort, sat near them, biting at a hunch of black bread. “The mother is dead of the fever, now it is a year,” said the old woman. And then she turned and pointed at a truss of straw under the narrow slit that was the only window, where lay a girl of their own age. “ And she never set foot on the ground, ” said old Nana. “ She was born in the year of the famine. Poverty poisoned her blood. Well,—do you see? In the spot of earth outside, — the motherearth, in which the King himself has no more right than I, he made of its dust as I, — I sow, I reap, — I, with my old hands. I pay the tithe, the tax, the rent. And then what is left? This! ” And she pointed to the black bread the child nibbled. “Look you! ” she cried. “ Look, where the castle has robbed me of food, of clothes, of the very wits of my little ones. It towers up there with all the winds blowing about it, because its rocks are fast with our blood, its foundations are our graves! ”

Frightened at their adventure, the girls had edged toward the window; it was near the door. The girl lying underneath it awoke, and looked at them and smiled, blue-eyed.

“She can smile — in this place!” thought Adria. As she gazed, the longing came, like some new sensation, to help her, to do something, even if it were less than nothing. She tore off her blue neck-ribbon and the chain of crystal beads she wore that, taking the color of her scarf, glanced like pale sapphires, that, taking the colorof Dalma’s, glanced like pink topazes, and put it all into the hands of the wondering girl who looked as if a piece of the sky had fallen. “Perhaps, —perhaps,” Adria faltered, — “I don’t know what may be, —but perhaps — the castle — will rob you no more.” And the two slipped through the door and ran with all their speed till out of breath; and then Adria threw herself face down on the-grass. “I never knew there were such things! ” she sobbed.

“You mustn’t know it now,” said Dalma.

It chanced that night, in the evening service,that the Chaplain read, “Behold the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crietli, and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord God of Sabaoth, ” and it struck Adria like a lash. “Behold, we count them happy that endure,” he further read. And she wondered if old Nana and her kin were happy in enduring.

Not many days afterward old Nana found outside her door a small bag of silver pieces, —it was all the money the two girls had, and they did not dare sell a jewel in the town. The old woman took it up and shook it before her eyes. “ I know you, whence you are! ” she cried. And with the flash of her sunken eyes you could not tell were she laughing or crying. She poured out the money on her leathern palm and counted it laboriously. Then she replaced it in the bag and once more shook it in the light. “It is so much restored to me! ” she cried.

“She has not even gratitude,” whispered Dalma, behind her tree. “With her spirit I would have tossed it into the stream.”

“She cannot. There are the others,” said Adria gloomily. “And for the rest, she has no reason for gratitude. It is but a part of her own.”

For a time after this her books, her music, her botanizing, her rides with Dalma and governess and groom in the Long Chase, — none of her tasks interested, none of her amusements amused the Princess Adria. One day she said to the Directress, “Madame, is it true that kings have power because in the beginning they were the stronger? ” “Highness,” was the reply, “kings have power by the will of God.”

“ I suppose all things are by the will of God,” said Adria. “But is it true that kings have robbed the people ? ” “Kings,” said the Directress, “are the protectors of the people.”

“Does the King, my cousin, protect old Nana down in the forest ? ”

Whether this conversation were reported to her cousin, or whether because the death of the old Prince Rhod had advanced the young princess a step in the succession, presently appeared at the castle masters of a different quality from previous teachers, and in addition to her languages, her mathematics, her belles-lettres, there were studies concerning the science of government, the art of war, the rights of kings, the philosophy of history, the story of the heroes of her house and race, — Dalma laboring behind. “How much better,” said Dalma, “would one live hero be than a brigade of these old fighting men at arms ! Why should we concern ourselves with them and their dust and the rust on their swords ? They are very dull, these ancestors of yours.”

“Yet the Directress says they were each anointed of the Lord. Can you think the touch of some blessed oil should make me of better dust than old Nana’s ? ”

“Of what use now, that anointing? Not one of those ancient gentlemen would know how to handle small arms if he were here to-day. What would any of them say to a voice coming out of the wall from five hundred miles away? They would cry witchcraft; and some one must be burned. Give me a different order. A good seat in the saddle, a good hand on the bridle, a good step in the dance ” —

“And his hair shall be of what color it please God,” said the princess, who was well up in her English.

“By no means. Of what color it pleases me! He shall be noble, he shall be modern ” —

“And no more? ”

“ The rest, ” said Dalma, laughing, “the rest is silence.”

So the young things began to dream of their heroes, as bourgeois or peasant girls might do; if with a difference. But to Adria, either her ideals were too sacred for discussion, or they were not yet freed from the clay. Only once down a glade in the Long Chase, where the sunlight fell, she saw a group of hunters pass, one following who might have been Apollo, — tall, erect, and bright as any figure of her dream, and lingering in her dream.

The day came when the princess, with the Directress, was called to Court. Some one else had died. It was thought best to see of what the little possibility, as it was phrased, was made. In the meantime the little possibility was seeing of what the Court was made. And while she received sufficient deference, she was yet more or less at liberty, •—not to go about with Dalma, as of old, — but for drives with the ladies appointed her, and for strolling through galleries and churches, her soul delighted with the beauty she found, which, however, seemed to be nothing new, but as if it had always been a part of her life, — paintings, sculptures, cathedrals, palaces, — as if the blood in her veins told what it had felt when in the veins of the kings, her forefathers. While walking in the palace down on the edge of the Shore of Shadow, she seemed to be in a dream she had dreamed before; it had upon her the effect of some familiar poem read again in a voice of silver. “It is because my mothers, my grandmothers before me, have trod these places that they are so pleasant to me, ” she thought. But through all the bewilderment of new beauty, recollection of old Nana and of the folk in the forest kept returning, — at first a blotch of gloom throwing the rest into high value, but at last darkening it all, so that the princess was not sorry when the time came for her to return to the old castle.

She was walking, one morning before her return, in the park of the Shore of Shadow, when a gentleman leaning on his cane stepped from one of the alleys and went along beside her, while her companions fell behind. She had, of course, been presented; but in her extreme youth another ceremonial audience was hardly worth while. If one had anything to say to her, one could meet her walking in the park.

“My child,” he said, “Providence may order that at some day you shall stand in the place of your ancestors ” — “I, sire? I?”

“You. Have you never thought of it, of a possible succession to the crown ? ” “Oh no, no, not once! ”

“That is well. To-day it seems impossible. Yet things as unlikely, — I will not say have happened, but have been determined. You are very remote. But should the improbable arrive, I would have you prepared. One’s hands should be made strong for such responsibility. I would wish one to whom the crown came to understand that it is sent from heaven. One does not rule by the will of the people, but by the will of God. It is the Lord God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, who will have made you Queen ” —

“Make me Queen! ” she exclaimed. “Oh no, no,” she murmured then, with a bowed head and a quick warding motion of her hands.

“You do right to feel the awe of majesty.” The old King smiled. “So the mother of the Lord received the command from heaven, ” he thought, but did not say. “For kingship,” he continued aloud, “ is a perpetual sacrament. It is an act into which the King enters alone with God.”

“Is it permitted to me to speak? ” asked the princess, after a moment in which the King seemed lost in thought.

“ Freely, ” said the King, looking at the young girl, well pleased.

“ The people, ” she said then. “ What of them ? ”

The King’s brow clouded slightly.

“ It is as I have heard, ” he said. “ The new heresies have reached even into the fastnesses of the hills. ” “ The people, ” added the old monarch after a brief pause, “were given to the King with the kingdom. They are his. They are his as his children are his. Except for times of madness, always have the King and the people been one. The army is to-day the King’s right hand. The nobles — the feudatories, the arriere-ban — are his enemy. Always, except in times of madness, when things rushed to ruin and they fled to the King’s shelter, his enemy, — demanding newer privilege, encroaching beyond old right, conspiring to dethrone and enthrone, laying sacrilegious hands upon the altar of the living God. And for you, remember, that even if a thousand years of royal blood had not made you not as others are, — if, indeed, it was not a different clay went to your making in the beginning, — yet the oil of your anointing, of your consecration, renders you sacred and apart; as our cousins of another faith hold that the act of blessing makes of the bread and wine the body of God. You are young, ” the King continued, looking down the length of green shadow through which the shafts of sunshine fell upon them as they walked, “but youth of the royal breed should have perception and understanding beyond the count of years. My child, ” he said, turning toward her, “under one of the jewels of this ring there is hidden a particle of the sword of that ancestor who won my crown. Wear it. And if, upon occasion, your faith in yourself and in your divine heirship falter, look at it, touch it, and feel the iron in your blood ! ” And passing round a leafy screen, His Majesty disappeared as he had come, and left her with the ring upon her finger.

Never did the castle on its crag above the villages seem so secure and so serene a place as to Adria coming home. Never was the pleasaunce so sweet of a twilight, the Long Chase so green and rich of a sunlit morning, with mossy covert and sparkling stream ; never was the solitude so enriching; never was Dalma so dear; never was it so delightful to be alive. Far off were King and capital and all improbable chances. Never, moreover, was it so heart-rending to explore among the dwellers of the forest, and never had she been so joyous as when her somewhat enlarged revenues allowed her to give them help. Sometimes they met a hunter in the forest, sometimes old Nana and her kind; and for a time life was full of the happiness that belongs to youth and freedom.

But when next the princess was called to Court, she saw by the differing fashion of her reception, and by the manner of those who had become aware of her, that the steps between her and uncoveted greatness were fewer than before. And it was after her return the second time that the responsibility that might some day be hers began to occupy her thoughts in a manner that Dalma found exceedingly tiresome. The condition of the poor of the forest, of the industrial of the cities, of all the internal affairs of the kingdom, became more interesting to her than the action of any drama had ever been. It presently seemed to her that the life of the little kingdom was only an epitome of the wide tragedy of history; and how to make its people happier and better was a quest greater than that of the Crusaders for the Holy Sepulchre.

She was still in the shadow of these reflections, when it was thought best the Princess Adria should travel and see the world; — not in much state, if any, but with a sufficient retinue, and a good purse. And so she saw Rome, and its old splendor, and lived a while under the charm of Florence, and bought lovely things in Paris, and came at last to England.

The Princess Adria was now a very beautiful young woman. The great masses of her ondulé black hair folded her head as if carved out of ebony; the seashell pink blushed on her oval cheek; her features had the fine chiseling of the antique, her eyes were like blue jewels; and although slight and not too tall, she held her head with the carriage of a young antlered stag. To the man who was walking beside her now she was not alone a beautiful woman, but she was the only woman in the world. Was it but yesterday when first they met ? It seemed as if he had known her from the eternities.

That yesterday morning she had outstripped her attendants, one or other of whom seldom left her, and climbing rapidly an ascending path between trees twisted by a thousand storms, had found herself on a cliff high in air, a wide field of sea battling in big billows and tossing clouds of foam at its base far below, and the glory of it smote her in the face. A cool wind from the far seahollows blew about her; its salt taste touched her lips; the great gray shield, with here its silver shining, and there its purpling bloom, and everywhere its allembracing sound, belonged to the world of mighty forces, and she was in the presence of illimitable largeness.

It was while she stood on the edge of the cliff, drinking draughts of the fresh air and equal draughts of the wild splendor, in the exhilaration of the sudden delight of it, that there came a noise above her head like the flapping of sails, followed by high discordant shrieks, and a pair of eagles were sweeping about her in fierce attack and defense of their nest in a jut of the rock beneath.

She had an intrepid spirit, not easily daunted. But it was idle to flourish her parasol at them; its very scarlet was something hostile. Yet it was her only weapon, and shaking it defiantly she slipped on the thin lichen, and might have been driven backward over the brink had not at the instant a stout alpenstock lifted in air sent one of the assailants falling with a broken wing and the other swooping after it; and she looked up to see, with a strange throb of memory, a young man, tall and fair, his eye as angry as the eagle’s, his stick still singing in the air. “Oh,” she gasped, in her own tongue, “I believe they would have picked out my eyes ! ”

“ Small blame to them ! ” thought the young man, looking into those wells of blue lustre under their black shadow. But bowing, he said in the same language, “I am glad I was at hand.”

“I don’t know how to thank you,” she exclaimed in English, her accent piquant and musical, his own accent having assured her English would be right.

“ I am thanked sufficiently now, ” he said. And he offered his hand to help her rise.

“ I fear, ” she faltered, “ I — my foot — it fails me ! How am I to walk ? ”

“Lean on me, ” he said. “If you will point the way, I think we can follow it.” And in such fashion they wound their way down the gradual slope of the cliff, now and then pausing for a moment, once his arm having to pass about her at a difficult turn. And what thrill then was this that at the touch trembled through his veins ? In the same breath perhaps she felt — who knows what? But after one penetrating glance she turned her head away, till he saw the curve of her white neck reddening with the slow flush.

Love is an electric spark. Its heavenly lightning struck Fairfax in that heart-beat. The breath of roses and their blush, the velvet of their petals, the sound of murmuring music, the rippling of waters, all life and light and beauty seemed impersonated in the sweetness of this woman beside him.

And for her? Except a chance exclamation, there had been hazarded once and again only the merest commonplaces rendered necessary by the path. Yet she had gathered that he was from the Priory, the neighboring estate of a friend of the house where she was staying, and aware of the English pride of caste, no question of inequality had occurred to her. Indeed, her simple life in the hills had not yet forced upon her intelligence any strong sense of superiority. She saw that he was a gentleman. And for the rest, one cannot call the answer of soul to soul a miracle, since it is a common process of nature, but it has the sweet suddenness, the swiftness, the astonishment of one. The difference in the moment was that he knew what had befallen and she did not.

“There are my friends,” she said, as they reached at last the glade below in whose distant sun and shadow a group of ladies walked. “It would be ungracious to say that they will relieve you of this trouble, after your kindness. I am staying with the duchess. May I not hope to see you at the Weald? ”

Might she not hope ? As if any power on earth could keep him away!

“I dine there Thursday night,” he replied. “A function, I believe, to welcome an expected dignitary, — some one of the countless foreign princelings that infest Europe.”

“Ah!” she said. “These English lords, they regard the least of their own order as the superior of everything less than the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire ! But for me, I often think that the infesting princelings would be glad to lay down their little power and join the proletariat, without care, without responsibility, — would be glad to play a little while.” And although she smiled, and although sunbeams always lurked in that smile of hers, there was a something melancholy in her tone.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose that is what the Princess Adria is doing now.” Her foot was better, and she withdrew from his support. But he still kept along beside her. It was the first time in her life that she had been alone with any man other than her old cousin, the King. If this was play, why not more of it? It was sufficiently amusing. “And you do not find yourself interested in her work or her play? ” she said.

“Oh, in a way. As a student of men and manners and forces of government, — occupied with sociological conditions. ”

“ And so even an old — what is this you call it ? — an old frump of a princess might have an interest ? ”

He laughed. “I don’t know if this one is a frump or a fairy ” —

“Oh, she is not exactly either! ” “You know her then? ”

“As well, perhaps, as any one. She does not mean ill, poor thing.” And by this they had come where her ladies stood, and she turned and extended her hand with a gesture of dismissal, a trace of archness in her smile.

To the amazement of her ladies he took the hand, and held it for the fraction of a moment. Perhaps she herself had expected him to lift it to his lips, with his own hand beneath it. But as he bent his all but colossal height, she said to herself it was the head of a Greek god ; and if not the face of a god it was nevertheless, in its heroic beauty, that striking one of the aquiline cast, with an impress, in its wholesome fairness, of health and masterful strength, the face of a man who might conquer continents and found a race of kings.

It was the magic moment when twilight is still informed with sunset that Fairfax the next evening met the princess, a lady and gentleman following her. He paused a moment uncertainly, but she looked up brightly and with recognition, and he approached.

“ If we had lost our way, ” she said, “I would think you had a habit of arriving at the fortunate moment.”

“ Most fortunate in any event for me,” he responded.

She wore a long scarf of thin scarlet silk about her head and shoulders, which gave her a gypsy-like air. But whether she were fine lady or romany did not occur to him ; as he had felt the day before, she was simply the one woman, as Eve was the one in her garden. The readjustment of atoms had taken place, and to neither of them with their unsealed eyes would the world ever be the same.

“We have been looking at the ruin of the ruins,” she said. “I have a thread of association with them, since one of my people once ruled here.”

“Possibly, in the increase of population, in most of us the blood of the king is mingled with the blood of his serf. Yet if one knew just which vein held the king’s ” —

“ One would let it escape ? For all that, I fancy one would rather it were the blood of Richard than of Garth the churl ? ”

“I don’t know. If it were the blood of Richard, one would be under an unspeakable debt to the churl. One could never make things equal with him. All one’s generations in the light built on his years in the dark, all one’s strength and lustihood built of his decrepitude and decay.”

“So you occupy yourself with the problem of the poor ? ”

“There is no other,” he said, looking down. “It comprises all the rest, even the goodness of God.”

“I also,” she murmured. “I also think more concerning it than is good for one’s peace.”

“You! ” he said, turning to look at her squarely. “But you have no reason. Y ou are too young, you are too ” — He did not finish the sentence. “As for me,” he said presently, “Fate has served me so that I have nothing to do but serve others.”

“ I did not know that English noblemen burdened their consciences with the wrongs of the submerged portion.”

“I am not very familiar with the English conscience. I am an American. But possibly ” —

She did not hear what he was saying. An American. It was a blow. In her innocent unconsciousness she could not have told herself why. But far in the obscure of unformulated thought there may have been the intuitive perception that a great English nobleman — was not impossible ; but American, — that was out of the question. For what? A sudden stinging blush burned her face. Before the blush mounted she had seen the cherubim with the flaming sword; but they had not abashed her; she had touched and tasted the fruit of the tree of life.

His voice sang in her ears like the wind in the bough as, loitering a little, he swung his stick over the ant-hill at a tree’s root. “If all peoples, all governments, were like these, ” that was what he was saying, she found. “One common point, the production, the preservation, the perpetuation of the race ! With not a thought of self. Yet who of us can sacrifice self without betrayal of trust? With the ant, with the bee, it is the race. With us the individual,

— if we are to attain to the stature of the gods. And so it becomes difficult. For ' things are in the saddle, and ride mankind,’ ” he added, with a smile of confidence in her comprehension.

The blush swept up her cheek again with that smile; this time a branding blush of shame. She had not known the man two days; she had seen him twice; she could not even tell his name ; she was speaking with him now in violation of usage and propriety, as well as of the etiquette of courts.

“ How beautiful she is when she blushes, ” he was thinking then. “How beautiful she is when she does n’t blush. What is she blushing about ? ”

“ What of it ? What of it ? ” she was thinking; the daring, the defiance, of her line returning to her. “Is it to be ashamed of? I may love a rose. I do not expect the rose to know. And if

— and if — Oh, what do I care for crowns and kingdoms and possibilities! What do I want with them! Let who will take my place near the throne, if there should be any place to take. I will have home, happiness, love, if — if ” — And by that the blush had faded, and as he gazed into them her eyes were like the twilight that holds the evening star.

And then the Baroness Dalma tripped up, a little brown-and-gold-butterfly creature, and the princess bowed a farewell in whose stateliness there was yet a hint of the morrow.

The Princess Adria knew now that she should at once bring to a close her stay at the Weald. But various festivities had been planned in her honor, and she hesitated to commit a rudeness, an unkindness. Moreover, her movements were arranged for her by those of authority at home. And then she was very young; perhaps also not altogether mistress of herself in this new phase of being. When Fairfax rode over with Lord Chetwynd the next morning, calling on the duchess, and, catching sight of Adria, joined her in the Long Gallery of the Portraits, while Chetwynd went on, she felt every nerve in her body tingling in tumult, and it was a moment before she could command peace.

They walked together down the long lane of masterpieces, and all the time they talked of the portraits, but they looked at each other.

“ There are so many legends concerning them,” she said pensively. “The duchess was telling them this morning. There seems to be a story of sin or sorrow about every one of them.”

“Lives splendidly worth living,” he said. “And lived only to make romance.”

“Were they splendidly worth living? ” she asked. “For my part, it sometimes seems that an unknown life in the wilderness were better.”

A light kindled his face. But just then the duchess came into the gallery; he turned to make his compliments, and Adria slipped away.

Harriet Prescott Spofford.

(To be continued.)