"You mistake!" he said slowly--"Love,--and by that name I mean a wholly
different thing from Passion,--comes to kings as to commoners,--but
whereas the commoner may win it if he can, the king must reject it. But
it comes,--and leaves a blank in the proudest life when it goes!"

He turned away abruptly, and the conversation was not again resumed.
But when he died, those who prepared his body for burial, found a gold
chain round his neck, holding the small medallion portrait of a woman,
and a curl of soft fair hair. Needless to say the portrait was not that
of the late Queen-Consort, who had died some years before her Royal
spouse, nor was the hair hers,--but when they brought the relic to the
new King, he laid it back with his own hands on his father's lifeless
breast, and let it go into the grave with him. For, being no longer the
crowned Servant of the State, he had the right as a mere dead man, to
the possession of his love-secret.

So at least thought his son and successor, who at times was given to
wondering whether if, like his father, he had such a secret he would be
able to keep it as closely and as well. He thought not. It would be
scarcely worth while. It can only be the greatest love that is always
silent,--and in the greatest,--that is, the ideal and self-renouncing
love,--he did not believe; though in his own life's experience he had
been given a proof that such love is possible to women, if not to men.
When he was about twenty, he had loved, or had imagined he loved, a
girl,--a pretty creature, who did not know him as a prince at all, but
simply as a college student. He used to walk with her hand in hand
through the fields by the river, and gather wild flowers for her to
wear in her little white bodice. She had shy soft eyes, and a timid,
yet trusting look, full of tenderness and pathos. Moved by a romantic