tort. "Has your
Highness any preference as to my residence during your absence?"

"None," he replied sadly, "but I shall be happier if you do not make
choice of your Neapolitan villa."

She flashed at him indignantly, "You wish to estrange me from my family,
from my sister Caroline."

"I have only the highest respect for her Majesty, the Queen of Naples,"
he replied; "her devotion to her husband is undoubted. I could wish--"
and here the Prince paused.

"That I were more like her," the Princess finished his sentence.

"I never said so, Pauline," he said impulsively, "or wished that you
were like any other than yourself."

His last words should have softened her, but, pained and indignant at
his desertion, she hardly heeded them; how was she to know that Camillo
Borghese was, under his cold exterior, very honestly in love with his
wife and just now cruelly tortured with jealousy of her brother-in-law,
the dare-devil Murat? For the latter was as unscrupulous as he was
handsome, as Napoleon was to find to his cost, though in recognition of
his services as a dashing leader of cavalry he had rewarded him with the
hand of his sister Caroline and the crown of Naples.

Hitherto the Princess had not even remarked the bold admiration of her
brother-in-law, and after the departure of her husband she wept and
sulked for days, when suddenly an event of great political importance,
which was also of deep personal interest to herself, threw into the
background every other consideration.

Napoleon's abdication and the treaty of Fontainebleau came upon his
friends with the shock of an earthquake. Especially to his sister
Pauline it was as though the foundations of the earth were tottering.
He had been the Providence of all his family, dividing the nations
between them; but Pauline had been his favourite, he had loved her
sincerely, and she had responded with the utmost devotion.

"I will go to him in his trouble," she declared, and though her
secretary could not see how her presence could aid the deposed Emperor,
he could not but approve her generous impulse.

She met her brother at Hyeres near the frontier of France, from which
point he embarked for the Island of Elba. The allies had granted him the
lordship of the island, with an income to support a pseudo court; but
the framers of that treaty, and Napoleon himself, knew well that its
terms were a farce and his kingdom in reality a prison.

What transpired between the Prin