m the envelope.

Benton's face paled a little as he drew out the many pages covered with
a woman's handwriting, but there was no one to see that or to notice the
tremor of his fingers.

For a moment he held the pages off, seeing only the "Dearest" at the
top, and the wild way the pen had raced, forming almost shapeless
characters.

"Dearest," she said in part, "I write now because I must turn to
someone--because my heart must speak or break. All day I must smile as
befits royalty, and act as befits one whose part is written for her.
Unless there be an outlet, there must be madness. I have enclosed this
envelope in another and enjoined you not to read it until March 5th.
Then it will be too late for you to come to me. If you came to-night,
you would find me hurrying out to meet you and to surrender. Duty would
so gladly lay down its arms to Love, dear, and desert the fight.

"To-night I have slipped away from the uniforms, the tawdry mockery of a
puppet court, to find the pitiful comfort of rehearsing my heart-ache
to you, who own my heart. In my life here every hour is mapped, and I
seem to move from cell to cell. So many obsequious jailers who call
themselves courtiers stand about and seem to watch me, that I feel as if
I had to ask permission to draw my breath. Out in the narrow streets of
this little picture town, I see dark-skinned, bare-footed girls. Some of
them carry skins of wine on their heads. All of them are poor. They also
are gloriously free. As they pass the palace, they look up enviously,
and I, from the inside, look out enviously. I know how Richard of the
Lion Heart felt when he was a prisoner in France, only I have not the
comfort of a Lion Heart, and it is not written in the book of things
that you shall pass outside and hear my harp--and rescue me.... One
little taste of liberty I give myself. It caused a terrible battle at
first, but I was stubborn and told them that if I was going to be Queen
I was going to do just what I wanted, and that if they didn't like it,
they could get some other girl to be Queen, so of course they let me....
There is an old half-forgotten roadway walled in on both sides that runs
through the town from this horrible palace to the woods upon the
mountain. There is some sort of foolish legend that in the old days the
Kings used to go by this protected road to a high point called Look-out
Rock, and stand there where they could see pretty much all of this
miserable little K