e? Was she to
govern in the household of the king even after the king had departed?
The woman bent over the dying man, the covetousness of her soul showing
in her eyes, struggle as she might to retain her habitual and
unparalleled self-control.

The dying man muttered uneasily. His mind was clouded, his eyes saw
other things. He turned back to earlier days, when life was bright, when
he, Louis, as a young man, had lived and loved as any other.

"Louise," he murmured. "Louise! Forgive! Meet me--Louise--dear one. Meet
me yonder--"

An icy pallor swept across the face of the arch hypocrite who bent over
him. Into her soul there sank like a knife this consciousness of the
undying power of a real love. La Valliere, the love of the youth of
Louis, La Valliere, the beautiful, and sweet, and womanly, dead and gone
these long years since, but still loved and now triumphant--she it was
whom Louis now remembered.

Maintenon turned from the bed-side. She stood, an aged and unhappy
woman, old, gray and haggard, not success but failure written upon every
lineament. For one instant she stood, her hands clenched, slow anger
breaking through the mask which, for a quarter of a century, she had so
successfully worn.

"Bah!" she cried. "Bah! 'Tis a pretty rendezvous this king would set
for me!" And then she swept from the room, raged for a time apart, and
so took leave of life and of ambition.

At length even the last energies of the once stubborn will gave way. The
last gasp of the failing breath was drawn. The herald at the window
announced to the waiting multitude that Louis the Fourteenth was no
more.

"Long live the king!" exclaimed the multitude. They hailed the new
monarch with mockery; but laughter, and sincere joy and feasting were
the testimonials of their emotions at the death of the king but now
departed.

On the next day a cheap, tawdry and unimposing procession wended its way
through the back streets of Paris, its leader seeking to escape even the
edges of the mob, lest the people should fall upon the somber little
pageant and rend it into fragments. This was the funeral cortege of
Louis, the Grand Monarque, Louis the lustful, Louis the bigot, Louis the
ignorant, Louis the unhappy. They hurried him to his resting-place,
these last servitors, and then hastened back to the palaces to join
their hearts and voices to the rising wave of joy which swept across all
France at the death of this beloved ruler.

Now it happ