gone masters, and its broad windows opened out on a white marble loggia
fronting the ocean, where festoons of flowers clambered and hung, in
natural tufts and trails of foliage and blossom, mingling their sweet
odours with the fresh scent of the sea. Amid all the glow and delicacy
of colour, the crowning perfection of the perfect environment was the
Queen-Consort, lovelier in her middle-age than most women in their
teens. An exquisite figure of stateliness and dignity, robed in such
hues and adorned with such jewels as best suited her statuesque beauty,
and attended by ladies of whose more youthful charms she was never
envious, having indeed no cause for envy, she was a living defiance to
the ravages of time, and graced her royal husband's dinner-table with
the same indifferent ease as she graced his throne, unchanging in the
dazzling light of her physical faultlessness. He, looking at her with
mingled impatience and sadness, almost wished she would grow older in
appearance with her years, and lose that perfect skin, white as
alabaster,--that glittering but cold luminance of eye. For experience
had taught him the worthlessness of beauty unaccompanied by tenderness,
and fair faces had no longer the first attraction for him. His eldest
son, Prince Humphry, bore a strong resemblance to himself,--he was tall
and slim, with a fine face, and a well-built muscular figure; the other
two younger princes, Rupert and Cyprian, aged respectively eighteen and
sixteen, were like their mother,--beautiful in form and feature, but as
indifferent to all tenderness of thought and sentiment as they were
full of splendid health and vigour. And, despite the fact that the
composition and surroundings of his household were, to all outward
appearances, as satisfactory as a man in his position could expect them
to be, the King was intellectually and spiritually aware of the
emptiness of the shell he called 'home.'

Love was lacking; his beautiful wife was the ice-wall against which all