tter drop, content that they should
remain in the forbidding relations which had existed between them before
this happening. But Sophia was uncompromising in her demand for strict
justice.

"If I am guilty, I am unworthy of you," she told him. "If innocent, you
are unworthy of me."

There was no more to be said. A consistory court was assembled to
divorce them. But since with the best intentions there was no faintest
evidence of her adultery, this court had to be content to pronounce the
divorce upon the ground of her desertion.

She protested against the iniquity of this. But she protested in vain.
She was carried off into the grim captivity of a castle on the Ahlen, to
drag out in that melancholy duress another thirty-two years of life.

Her death took place in November of 1726. And the story runs that on her
death-bed she delivered to a person of trust a letter to her sometime
husband, now King George I. of England. Seven months later, as King
George was on his way to his beloved Hanover, that letter was placed
in his carriage as it crossed the frontier into Germany. It contained
Sophia's dying declaration of innocence, and her solemn summons to King
George to stand by her side before the judgment-seat of Heaven within a
year, and there make answer in her presence for the wrongs he had done
her, for her blighted life and her miserable death.

King George's answer to that summons was immediate. The reading of
that letter brought on the apoplectic seizure of which he died in his
carriage next day--the 9th of June, 1727--on the road to Osnabruck.

XI. THE TYRANNICIDE

Charlotte Corday and Jean Paul Morat

Tyrannicide was the term applied to her deed by Adam Lux, her lover in
the sublimest and most spiritual sense of the word--for he never so much
as spoke to her, and she never so much as knew of his existence.

The sudden spiritual passion which inflamed him when he beheld her in
the tumbril on her way to the scaffold is a fitting corollary to her
action. She in her way and he in his were alike sublime; her tranquil
martyrdom upon the altar of Republicanism and his exultant martyrdom
upon the altar of Love were alike splendidly futile.

It is surely the strangest love-story enshrined in history. It has its
pathos, yet leaves no regrets behind, for there is no might-have-been
which death had thwarted. Because she died, he loved her; because he
loved her, he died. That is all, but for the details wh