church and there to have left, prayerfully,
some dearly beloved body--that had been his life. His son had escaped
that. But it was poor comfort to him.

On other years he had had the Crown Prince with him as much as possible
on this dreary day of days. But the Crown Prince was exiled, in
disgrace. Not even for the comfort of his small presence could stern
discipline be relaxed.

Annunciata was not much comfort to him. They had always differed, more
or less, the truth being, perhaps, that she was too much like the King
ever to sympathize fully with him. Both were arrogant, determined,
obstinate. And those qualities, which age was beginning to soften in the
King, were now, in Annunciata, in full strength and blooming.

But there was more than fundamental similarity at fault. Against her
father the Archduchess held her unhappy marriage.

"You did this," she had said once, when an unusually flagrant escapade
had come to the ears of the Palace. "You did it. I told you I hated him.
I told you what he was, too. But you had some plan in mind. The plan
never materialized, but the marriage did. And here I am." She had
turned on him then, not angrily, but with cold hostility. "I shall never
forgive you for it," she said.

She never had. She made her daily visit to her father, and, as he grew
more feeble, she was moved now and then to pity for him. But it was
pity, nothing more. The very hands with which she sometimes changed his
pillows were coldly efficient. She had not kissed him in years.

And now, secretly willing that Hedwig should marry Karl, she was ready
to annoy him by objecting to it.

On the day after her conversation with General Mettlich, she visited
the King. It was afternoon. The King had spent the morning in his
study, propped with pillows as was always the case now, working with a
secretary. The secretary was gone when she entered, and he sat alone.
Over his knees was spread one of the brilliant rugs that the peasants
wove in winter evenings, when the snow beat about their small houses and
the cattle were snug in barns. Above it his thin old face looked pinched
and pale.

He had passed a trying day. Once having broken down the Chancellor's
barrier of silence, the King had insisted on full knowledge; with
the result that he had sat, aghast, amid the ruins of his former
complacency. The country and the smaller cities were comparatively
quiet, so far as demonstrations against the Government were concerned.