"I am dying," she said quite distinctly, "Lord Jesus, make it short."
In a few minutes the Queen of Prussia had passed beyond the power of Napoleon to harm.
"The ways of the Lord," wrote the old Countess, "are implacable and holy, but they are dreadful to travel. The King, the children, the city have lost all in the world. I speak not for myself, but my sorrow is great. My Queen! Oh, my poor Queen!"
CHAPTER XXV
AFTERWARDS
When his first grief was stilled, the King went to Fritz and Willy in the garden. Plucking a branch on which grew three roses, he returned with the little princes to the Queen. The three kissed her, and the King laid the roses in her hand as the second carriage dashed up to the palace.
Charlotte and Carl had come too late. Their mother had been dead a half hour. The old Countess was all they had now, and she hushed her sobs to comfort the King and her Queen's poor children, but, poor old lady, her heart was broken at eighty and she lived only a few years more.
The doctors who examined the body of Queen Louisa after death declared that a polypus, formed by grief and worry, had grown on her heart and killed her, but the people of Prussia would have none of this.
"A polypus, nein," they said. "It is Napoleon who has done this. We will rise. We will drive the tyrant from our land, for he has killed the best friend of Prussia."