of Heaven to hear the flattering tale that my prayers have
power to bring him back to life! To see him again, to have him once more
mine, were it only for a second, would mean that I could draw breath
again without mortal agony. Will you not come soon and soothe me with
such promises? Is not your love strong enough to deceive me?

But stay! it was you who told me beforehand that he would suffer through
me. Was it so indeed? Yes, it is true, I had no right to his love. Like
a thief, I took what was not mine, and my frenzied grasp has crushed
the life out of my bliss. The madness is over now, but I feel that I am
alone. Merciful God! what torture of the damned can exceed the misery in
that word?

When they took him away from me, I lay down on the same bed and hoped to
die. There was but a door between us, and it seemed to me I had strength
to force it! But, alas! I was too young for death; and after forty days,
during which, with cruel care and all the sorry inventions of medical
science, they slowly nursed me back to life, I find myself in the
country, seated by my window, surrounded with lovely flowers, which he
made to bloom for me, gazing on the same splendid view over which
his eyes have so often wandered, and which he was so proud to have
discovered, since it gave me pleasure. Ah! dear Renee, no words can tell
how new surroundings hurt when the heart is dead. I shiver at the sight
of the moist earth in my garden, for the earth is a vast tomb, and it
is almost as though I walked on _him_! When I first went out, I trembled
with fear and could not move. It was so sad to see his flowers, and he
not there!

My father and mother are in Spain. You know what my brothers are, and
you yourself are detained in the country. But you need not be uneasy
about me; two angels of mercy flew to my side. The Duc and the Duchesse
de Soria hastened to their brother in his illness, and have been
everything that heart could wish. The last few nights before the end
found the three of us gathered, in calm and wordless grief, round the
bed where this great man was breathing his last, a man among a thousand,
rare in any age, head and shoulders above the rest of us in everything.
The patient resignation of my Felipe was angelic. The sight of his
brother and Marie gave him a moment's pleasure and easing of his pain.

"Darling," he said to me with the simple frankness which never deserted
him, "I had almost gone from life without leaving to F