ecalled Hortense to her
mother's side, and she left the Hague and hastened to Paris.

CHAPTER VII.

PREMONITIONS.

Josephine's fears, and the prophecies of the French clairvoyante, were
now about to be fulfilled. The crown which Josephine had reluctantly and
sorrowfully accepted, and which she had afterward worn with so much
grace and amiability, with such natural majesty and dignity, was about
to fall from her head. Napoleon had the cruel courage, now that the
dreamed-of future had been realized, to put away from him the woman who
had loved him and chosen him when he had nothing to offer her but his
hopes for the future. Josephine, who, with smiling courage and brave
fidelity, had stood at his side in the times of want and humiliation,
was now to be banished from his side into the isolation of a glittering
widowhood. Napoleon had the courage to determine that this should be
done, but he lacked the courage to break it to Josephine, and to
pronounce the word of separation himself. He was determined to sacrifice
to his ambition the woman he had so long called his "good angel;" and
he, who had never trembled in battle, trembled at the thought of her
tears, and avoided meeting her sad, entreating gaze.

But Josephine divined the whole terrible misfortune that hung
threateningly over her head. She read it in the gloomy, averted
countenance of the emperor, who, since his recent return from Vienna,
had caused the door that connected his room with that of his wife to be
locked; she read it in the faces of the courtiers, who dared to address
her with less reverence, but with a touch of compassionate sympathy; she
heard it in the low whispering that ceased when she approached a group
of persons in her parlors; it was betrayed to her in the covert,
mysterious insinuations of the public press, which attached a deep and
comprehensive significance to the emperor's journey to Vienna.

She knew that her destiny must now be fulfilled, and that she was too
weak to offer any resistance. But she was determined to act her part as
wife and empress worthily to the end. Her tears should not flow
outwardly, but inwardly to her grief-stricken heart; she suppressed her
sighs with a smile, and concealed the pallor of her cheeks with rouge.
But she longed for a heart to whom she could confide her anguish, and
show her tears, and therefore called her daughter to her side.

How painful was this reunion of mother and daughter, how many tears