s of the heart never stood in Rupert's way.

The marriage which had set all Ruritania on fire with joy and formed
in the people's eyes the visible triumph over Black Michael and his
fellow-conspirators was now three years old. For three years the
Princess Flavia had been queen. I am come by now to the age when a man
should look out on life with an eye undimmed by the mists of passion.
My love-making days are over; yet there is nothing for which I am more
thankful to Almighty God than the gift of my wife's love. In storm it
has been my anchor, and in clear skies my star. But we common folk are
free to follow our hearts; am I an old fool for saying that he is a fool
who follows anything else? Our liberty is not for princes. We need wait
for no future world to balance the luck of men; even here there is an
equipoise. From the highly placed a price is exacted for their state,
their wealth, and their honors, as heavy as these are great; to the
poor, what is to us mean and of no sweetness may appear decked in the
robes of pleasure and delight. Well, if it were not so, who could sleep
at nights? The burden laid on Queen Flavia I knew, and know, so well as
a man can know it. I think it needs a woman to know it fully; for even
now my wife's eyes fill with tears when we speak of it. Yet she bore it,
and if she failed in anything, I wonder that it was in so little. For
it was not only that she had never loved the king and had loved another
with all her heart. The king's health, shattered by the horror and
rigors of his imprisonment in the castle of Zenda, soon broke utterly.
He lived, indeed; nay, he shot and hunted, and kept in his hand some
measure, at least, of government. But always from the day of his release
he was a fretful invalid, different utterly from the gay and jovial
prince whom Michael's villains had caught in the shooting lodge. There
was worse than this. As time went on, the first impulse of gratitude and
admiration that he had felt towards Mr. Rassendyll died away. He came to
brood more and more on what had passed while he was a prisoner; he was
possessed not only by a haunting dread of Rupert of Hentzau, at whose
hands he had suffered so greatly, but also by a morbid, half mad
jealousy of Mr. Rassendyll. Rudolf had played the hero while he lay
helpless. Rudolf's were the exploits for which his own people cheered
him in his own capital. Rudolf's were the laurels that crowned his
impatient brow. He had enough nobil