the questioner in amazement
"How!" said she. "Is it possible, then, to love, if you are not loved?"

"You are right," sighed Catharine. "One must be very humble and silly to
be able to do that."

"My God! how pale you are, queen!" cried Elizabeth, who just now noticed
Catharine's pale face. "Your features are distorted; your lips tremble.
My God! what does this mean?"

"It is nothing!" said Catharine, with a smile full of agony. "The
excitement and alarm of to-day have exhausted my strength. That is all.
Besides, a new grief threatens us, of which you as yet know nothing.
The king is ill. A sudden dizziness seized him, and made him fall almost
lifeless at my side. I came to bring you the king's message; now duty
calls me to my husband's sickbed. Farewell, Elizabeth."

She waved a good-by to her with her hand, and with hurried step left the
room. She summoned up courage to conceal the agonies of her soul, and to
pass proud and stately through the halls. To the courtiers bowing before
her, she would still be the queen, and no one should suspect what agony
was torturing her within like flames of fire. But at last arrived at her
boudoir--at last sure of being overheard and observed by no one--she was
no longer the queen, but only the agonized, passionate woman.

She sank on her knees, and cried, with a heart-rending wail of anguish:
"My God, my God, grant that I may become mad, so that I may no longer
know that he has forsaken me!"

CHAPTER XXXVI. THE CATASTROPHE.

After days of secret torture and hidden tears, after nights of sobbing
anguish and wailing sorrow, Catharine had at last attained to inward
peace; she had at last taken a firm and decisive resolution.

The king was sick unto death; and however much she had suffered and
endured from him, still he was her husband; and she would not stand
by his deathbed as a perjured and deceitful woman; she would not be
constrained to cast down her eyes before the failing gaze of the dying
king. She would renounce her love--that love, which, however, had
been as pure and chaste as a maiden's prayer--that love, which was as
unapproachably distant as the blush of morn, and yet had stood above her
so vast and brilliant, and had irradiated the gloomy pathway of her life
with celestial light.

She would make the greatest of sacrifices; she would give her lover
to another. Elizabeth loved him. Catharine would not investigate and
thoroughly examine the point, whether Th