“I am fitly punished,” she conceded, “for my sceptical attitude. Henceforth, so far as the constitution of my mind will permit, I will be more hospitable to the convictions of the simple.”
How she adhered to this expiational resolution we shall behold.
From “The Queen’s Chaperon.”
The duke stepped from his carriage to a neighboring hill and cast his eye athwart his ancestral domain. “All this,” he mused, “I must renounce if I comply with the queen’s royal suggestion to fly with her to Rome. Is she worth the privation? I must have time to consider a transaction of such great importance.”
Hastily entering his carriage, he haughtily bade the coachman drive him to some expensive hotel, whence he dispatched a delicately perfumed note to her Majesty, saying that he should be detained a few days by affairs of state, but assuring her of his uncommon fidelity. Then he retired to his couch and thought it all over in Italian. The next day he arose and fled rapidly.
From “The Uplifting of Lennox.”
On hearing the terrible news Myra fell supine to earth without delay!
“Is it nothing?” inquired Lennox. “Is it only a temporary indisposition?—will it soon pass?”
But Myra replied only with a significant pallor which told all too plainly what the most accomplished linguist would vainly have striven to express.
How long she lay unconscious we know not, but promptly on becoming her previous self she let fall a multitude of tears.