The Little Lame Prince by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
page 9 of 160 (05%)
page 9 of 160 (05%)
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anybody had time to do anything more, there came a heavy, muffled,
startling sound. The great bell of the palace the bell which was only heard on the death of some one of the royal family, and for as many times as he or she was years old--began to toll. They listened, mute and horror-stricken. Some one counted: one--two--three--four--up to nine-and-twenty--just the Queen's age. It was, indeed, the Queen. Her Majesty was dead! In the midst of the festivities she had slipped away out of her new happiness and her old sufferings, not few nor small. Sending away all her women to see the grand sight,--at least they said afterward, in excuse, that she had done so, and it was very like her to do it,--she had turned with her face to the window, whence one could just see the tops of the distant mountains--the Beautiful Mountains, as they were called--where she was born. So gazing, she had quietly died. When the little Prince was carried back to his mother's room, there was no mother to kiss him. And, though he did not know it, there would be for him no mother's kiss any more. As for his godmother,--the little old woman in gray who called herself so,--whether she melted into air, like her gown when they touched it, or whether she flew out of the chapel window, or slipped through the doorway among the bewildered crowd, nobody knew--nobody ever thought about her. Only the nurse, the ordinary homely one, coming out of the Prince's nursery in the middle of the night in search of a cordial to quiet his continual moans, saw, sitting in the doorway, something which she would have thought a mere shadow, had she not seen shining out of it two eyes, |
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