s mind; and the long
journey on horseback, the last two days passed almost without
nourishment, owing to the hurried pressure of events, the heat of the sun
by day, the icy coldness of the night, all contributed to increase his
indisposition and to weary his delicate frame. For three hours he rode in
silence before his people, yet the light he had seen in the horizon
seemed no nearer; at last he ceased to follow it with his eyes, and his
head, feeling heavier and heavier, sank upon his breast. He gave the
reins to his tired horse, which of its own accord followed the high-road,
and, crossing his arms, allowed himself to be rocked by the monotonous
motion of his fellow-traveller, which frequently stumbled against the
large stones that strewed the road. The rain had ceased, as had the
voices of his domestics, whose horses followed in the track of their
master's. The young man abandoned himself to the bitterness of his
thoughts; he asked himself whether the bright object of his hopes would
not flee from him day by day, as that phosphoric light fled from him in
the horizon, step by step. Was it probable that the young Princess,
almost forcibly recalled to the gallant court of Anne of Austria, would
always refuse the hands, perhaps royal ones, that would be offered to
her? What chance that she would resign herself to renounce a present
throne, in order to wait till some caprice of fortune should realize
romantic hopes, or take a youth almost in the lowest rank of the army and
lift him to the elevation she spoke of, till the age of love should be
passed? How could he be certain that even the vows of Marie de Gonzaga
were sincere?

"Alas!" he said, "perhaps she has blinded herself as to her own
sentiments; the solitude of the country had prepared her soul to receive
deep impressions. I came; she thought I was he of whom she had dreamed.
Our age and my love did the rest. But when at court, she, the companion
of the Queen, has learned to contemplate from an exalted position the
greatness to which I aspire, and which I as yet see only from a very
humble distance; when she shall suddenly find herself in actual
possession of the future she aims at, and measures with a more correct
eye the long road I have to travel; when she shall hear around her vows
like mine, pronounced by lips which could undo me with a word, with a
word destroy him whom she awaits as her husband, her lord--oh, madman
that I have been!--she will see all her fol