sweetness may appear decked in the robes of pleasure and delight.
Well, if it were not so, who could sleep at nights? The burden
laid on Queen Flavia I knew, and know, so well as a man can know
it. I think it needs a woman to know it fully; for even now my
wife's eyes fill with tears when we speak of it. Yet she bore it,
and if she failed in anything, I wonder that it was in so little.
For it was not only that she had never loved the king and had
loved another with all her heart. The king's health, shattered by
the horror and rigors of his imprisonment in the castle of Zenda,
soon broke utterly. He lived, indeed; nay, he shot and hunted,
and kept in his hand some measure, at least, of government. But
always from the day of his release he was a fretful invalid,
different utterly from the gay and jovial prince whom Michael's
villains had caught in the shooting lodge. There was worse than
this. As time went on, the first impulse of gratitude and
admiration that he had felt towards Mr. Rassendyll died away. He
came to brood more and more on what had passed while he was a
prisoner; he was possessed not only by a haunting dread of Rupert
of Hentzau, at whose hands he had suffered so greatly, but also
by a morbid, half mad jealousy of Mr. Rassendyll. Rudolf had
played the hero while he lay helpless. Rudolf's were the exploits
for which his own people cheered him in his own capital. Rudolf's
were the laurels that crowned his impatient brow. He had enough
nobility to resent his borrowed credit, without the fortitude to
endure it manfully. And the hateful comparison struck him nearer
home. Sapt would tell him bluntly that Rudolf did this or that,
set this precedent or that, laid down this or the other policy,
and that the king could do no better than follow in Rudolf's
steps. Mr. Rassendyll's name seldom passed his wife's lips, but
when she spoke of him it was as one speaks of a great man who is