arm to be burned.

Certainly he had loved her madly, and to the ruin, many thought, of his
country, then at war with England for the possession of the empire of the
New World. He had hardly ever permitted her to be out of his sight; for
her, he had forgotten, or seemed to have forgotten, all grave affairs of
State; and, with that terrible blindness that passion brings upon its
servants, he had failed to notice that the elaborate ceremonies by which
he sought to please her did but aggravate the strange malady from which
she suffered. When she died he was, for a time, like one bereft of
reason. Indeed, there is no doubt but that he would have formally
abdicated and retired to the great Trappist monastery at Granada, of
which he was already titular Prior, had he not been afraid to leave the
little Infanta at the mercy of his brother, whose cruelty, even in Spain,
was notorious, and who was suspected by many of having caused the Queen's
death by means of a pair of poisoned gloves that he had presented to her
on the occasion of her visiting his castle in Aragon. Even after the
expiration of the three years of public mourning that he had ordained
throughout his whole dominions by royal edict, he would never suffer his
ministers to speak about any new alliance, and when the Emperor himself
sent to him, and offered him the hand of the lovely Archduchess of
Bohemia, his niece, in marriage, he bade the ambassadors tell their
master that the King of Spain was already wedded to Sorrow, and that
though she was but a barren bride he loved her better than Beauty; an
answer that cost his crown the rich provinces of the Netherlands, which
soon after, at the Emperor's instigation, revolted against him under the
leadership of some fanatics of the Reformed Church.--_The Birthday of the
Infranta_.