fter long years of unrest and unhappiness, she seemed assured
of peaceful years, secure in the affection of her son and her people,
and far removed from the husband who had brought so much misery into her
life.

But Natalie was fated never to be happy long, and once more her evil
Destiny was to snatch the cup from her lips, assuming this time the form
of Draga Maschin, one of her own ladies-in-waiting, under the spell of
whose black eyes and voluptuous charms her son quickly fell, after that
first dramatic incident at Biarritz, when she plunged into the sea to
his rescue and saved him from drowning.

Many months earlier a clairvoyante at Paris had told Natalie, "Your
Majesty is cherishing in your bosom a poisonous snake, which one day
will give you a mortal wound." She had smiled incredulously at the
warning, but she was soon to learn what truth it held. Certainly Draga
Maschin was the last person she would have suspected of being a source
of danger--a woman many years older than her son, the penniless widow of
a drunken engineer--a woman, moreover, of whose life, before Natalie had
taken pity on her poverty, many strange stories were told--how, for
instance, she had often been seen in low resorts, "with the arm of a
forester or a tradesman round her, singing the old Servian songs."

But she had not taken into account Draga's sensuous beauty, before which
her son was powerless. Each meeting left him more and more involved in
her toils, until, to the consternation of Servia and the horror of his
mother, he announced his intention of making her his Queen. Even Milan,
degraded as he was, was horror-struck when the news came to him in
Paris. "And this," he exclaimed, "is the act of 'Sacha'--my own son. He
is a monster, a thing of evil in the eyes of all men! The Maschin will
be Queen of Servia. What a reproach! What an evil! A creature like her!
A sordid creature! Could he not have put aside his love for this
low-born woman? But I could never make the fool understand that a King
has duties; he has something else to think of but love-making."

When taking leave of the friend who had brought him this evil news Milan
said, "I shall never see Servia again. My experience has been a bitter
one--everywhere treachery and deceit. And now my own son--_that_ has
broken my heart." A few months later, worn out by his excesses,
prematurely old and broken-hearted, the man who had prostituted life's
best gifts drew his last breath at Vi