ination; and the disease had latterly fastened so tenaciously upon
her system that she had even shunned the presence of the Queen,
believing that every eye which rested on her produced some baneful
result; while her very attendants were dismissed from her presence when
they had terminated their duties, and she thus remained hour after hour
in solitude, brooding over the sickly fancies of her disordered brain.
The sight of her husband's murderer had, however, instantly and for ever
restored the healthful tone of her mind. She did not weep, for she had
already exhausted all her tears; she asked no mercy, for she was aware
that, whatever might be her fate, she was alike prejudged and
pre-condemned; but she resigned herself passively into the hands of her
persecutors, with a Spartan firmness which she maintained to the last
hour of her existence.

Who shall venture to follow her to her prison-cell, and to trace the
tide of back-flowing thought which rolled like a receding wave from the
present to the past? Now, indeed, she left little behind her to regret.
From the husband to whom she had once been devoted with a love which
blinded her to all his errors and to all his egotism, she had, during
the last two years, been almost utterly estranged; her first-born and
idolized daughter was in her grave; the royal friend and almost
relative, to whom she had clung from her youth up, had refused even a
tear to her sufferings, or a shelter to her peril; her hoarded wealth
was in the hands of her enemies; and of all that she once boasted there
remained only her son. And what might be his fate?

But memory held wider stores than these; and who can doubt that
throughout that first long night of captivity they were probed to their
very depths! What palace-pageants--what closet-conspiracies--what
struggles for pre-eminence and power--what heart-burnings at defeat, and
exultation at success--must have swept hurricane-like across her
awakened soul, to be forgotten in their turn as she recalled the
childish sports of her early and hopeful years, under the sunny sky and
among the orange-groves of her native Florence, where, with her royal
playmate, she chased the hours along as though they were made only for
the happy!

Did she sleep the weary and outworn sleep of the wretched while those
sweet and soothing visions were still busy at her heart? And if so,
breathes there one who would have roused her, whatever may have been her
faults, from