er well. She had no doubt now that he loved her,
and did not hesitate to assure him in many covert ways that the feeling
was reciprocated. Brandilancia would have been blind indeed not to have
recognised her admiration, but he believed it merely appreciation of his
genius, whereas her mind was too limited to comprehend it. She was in
love with the possibility of being a queen upon such easy terms,
delighted to find that the necessary husband was no uncouth tyrant but a
man of winsome personality whose delicate assiduities were ever present
and yet never over passed the restraints of deference.

It would have been difficult for two persons to have more utterly
misunderstood each other. Brandilancia had reached the full maturity of
his mental powers. His genius had created many charming women, but the
ideal for which his lonely heart yearned had only gradually taken shape
in his mind, and the heroine which he now gave to literature marked an
epoch in his career.

He had found the plot of his drama sketched in part in one of the
novelli of Ser Giovanni; but the conception of an aristocratic yet
gracious lady gifted with all perfection, with which he replaced the
siren of Belmont, was not, as he supposed, a portrait from life of Marie
de' Medici. The character sprang directly from his own intense longing,
and by some unreasoning reflex action, his mind endowed the woman who
happened to be near him with qualities which he created and which she
unhappily did not possess.

The idol which he worshipped was absolutely the work of his own hands,
for it was not until his imagination had cheated his eyes, and he had
begun to look at Marie de' Medici through its flattering lenses that he
thought her beautiful. And yet at the age of twenty she possessed very
real attractions: a southern blond, not milky-veined, like the pale
maidens of the north, but with all the gold of the hot sunshine in her
hair, and the rich blood glowing through her fair skin like flame in an
alabaster lamp. Superbly modelled, but lithe and tall, she carried
regally the sumptuous opulence with which nature had endowed her, and
the soft curve of her shoulders, throat, and bosom had not as yet
blossomed into the plethora which Rubens depicted with so gloating a
brush. Nor was she precisely the same as when Brandilancia had looked
upon these charms unmoved. All arrogance and self-confidence were gone
or lay buried under the most appealing of coquetry, a shy tend