st asleep. The King presently went
into {123} the Queen's room, and then the princess started up and
asked, "Is he gone?" and added, fervently, "How tiresome he is!" Lord
Hervey asked if she had not been asleep; she said no; she had only
closed her eyes in order to escape taking part in the conversation, and
that she very much wished she could close her ears as well. "I am sick
to death," the dutiful princess said, "of hearing of his great courage
every day of my life. One thinks now of mamma, and not of him. Who
cares for his old storm? I believe, too, it is a great lie, and that
he was as much afraid as I should have been, for all what he says now,"
and she added a good many more comments to the same effect. Then the
King came back into the room, and his daughter ceased her comment on
his bravery and his truthfulness.

"One thinks of mamma, and not of him." That was exactly what George
would not have. He did dearly love the Queen after his own fashion; he
was deeply grieved at the thought of losing her; but he did not choose
to play second fiddle even to the dying. So in all his praises of her
and his laments for her he never failed to endeavor to impress on his
hearers the idea of his own immense superiority to her and to everybody
else. There is hardly anything in fiction so touching, so pitiful, so
painful, as this exposition of a naked, brutal, yet not quite selfish,
not wholly unloving, egotism. The Queen did not die on the Wednesday.
Thursday and Friday passed over in just the same way, with just the
same incidents--with the King alternately blubbering and bullying, with
the panegyrics of the dying woman, and the twenty times told tale of
"his old storm." The Queen was growing weaker and weaker. Those who
watched around her bed wondered how she was able to live so long in
such a condition of utter weakness. On the evening of Sunday, November
20th, she asked Dr. Tesier quietly how long it was possible that her
struggle could last. He told her that he was "of opinion that your
Majesty will be soon relieved." She thanked him for telling her, and
said in French, "So much the better." About {124} ten o'clock that
same night the crisis came. The King was asleep in a bed laid on the
floor at the foot of the Queen's bed. The Princess Emily was lying on
a couch in a corner of the room. The Queen began to rattle in her
throat. The nurse gave the alarm, and said the Queen was dying. The
Princess Caro