ad thought it "the fairest that
e'er the sun shone on," and held one grave, lustrous glance of the blue
imperial eyes above aught else on earth. Many had loved her--all without
return. Yet, although only twenty years had passed over her proud head,
the Princesse Corona d'Amague had been wedded and been widowed.

Wedded, with no other sentiment than that of a certain pity and a
certain honor for the man whose noble Spanish name she took. Widowed,
by a death that was the seal of her marriage sacrament, and left her his
wife only in name and law.

The marriage had left no chain upon her; it had only made her mistress
of wide wealth, of that villa on the Sicilian Sea, of that light,
spacious palace-dwelling in Paris that bore her name, of that vast
majestic old castle throned on brown Estremaduran crags, and looking
down on mighty woods of cork and chestnut, and flashing streams of
falling water hurling through the gorges. The death had left no
regret upon her; it only gave her for a while a graver shadow over the
brilliancy of her youth and of her beauty, and gave her for always--or
for so long, at least, as she chose to use it--a plea for that
indifference to men's worship of her which their sex called
heartlessness; which her own sex thought an ultra-refined coquetry; and
which was, in real truth, neither the one nor the other, but simply the
negligence of a woman very difficult to touch, and, as it had seemed,
impossible to charm.

None knew quite aright the history of that marriage. Some were wont
to whisper "ambition"; and, when that whisper came round to her, her
splendid lips would curl with as splendid a scorn.

"Do they not know that scarce any marriage can mate us equally?" she
would ask; for she came of a great Line that thought few royal branches
on equality with it; and she cherished as things of strictest creed the
legends that gave her race, with its amber hair and its eyes of sapphire
blue, the blood of Arthur in their veins.

Of a surety it was not ambition that had allied her, on his death-bed,
with Beltran Corona d'Amague; but what it was the world could never
tell precisely. The world would not have believed it if it had heard the
truth--the truth that it had been, in a different fashion, a gleam of
something of the same compassion that now made her merciful to a
common trooper of Africa which had wedded her to the dead Spanish
Prince--compassion which, with many another rich and generous thing,
l