ay beneath her coldness and her pride as the golden stamen lies folded
within the white, virginal, chill cup of the lily.

She had never felt a touch of even passing preference to any one out of
the many who had sought her high-born beauty; she was too proud to be
easily moved to such selection, and she was far too habituated to homage
to be wrought upon by it, ever so slightly. She was of a noble, sun-lit,
gracious nature, she had been always happy, always obeyed, always
caressed, always adored; it had rendered her immeasurably contemptuous
of flattery; it had rendered her a little contemptuous of pain. She had
never had aught to regret; it was not possible that she could realize
what regret was.

Hence men called and found her very cold; yet those of her own kin
whom she loved knew that the heart of a summer rose was not warmer, nor
sweeter, nor richer than hers. And first among these was her brother--at
once her guardian and her slave--who thought her perfect, and would
no more have crossed her will than he would have set his foot on her
beautiful, imperial head. Corona d'Amague had been his friend; the only
one for whom he had ever sought to break her unvarying indifference to
her lovers, but for whom even he had pleaded vainly until one autumn
season, when they had stayed together at a great archducal castle in
South Austria. In one of the forest-glades, awaiting the fanfare of the
hunt, she rejected, for the third time, the passionate supplication of
the superb noble who ranked with the D'Ossuna and the Medina-Sidonia. He
rode from her in great bitterness, in grief that no way moved her--she
was importuned with these entreaties to weariness. An hour after he was
brought past her, wounded and senseless; he had saved her brother from
imminent death at his own cost, and the tusks of the mighty Styrian boar
had plunged through and through his frame, as they had met in the narrow
woodland glade.

"He will be a cripple--a paralyzed cripple--for life!" said the one
whose life had been saved by his devotion to her that night; and his
lips shook a little under his golden beard as he spoke.

She looked at him; she loved him well, and no homage to herself could
have moved her as this sacrifice for him had done.

"You think he will live?" she asked.

"They say it is sure. He may live on to old age. But how? My God! what a
death in life! And all for my sake, in my stead!"

She was silent several moments; then she raised