For a moment he held the pages off, seeing only the "Dearest" at the

top, and the wild way the pen had raced, forming almost shapeless

characters.

"Dearest," she said in part, "I write now because I must turn to

someone--because my heart must speak or break. All day I must smile as

befits royalty, and act as befits one whose part is written for her.

Unless there be an outlet, there must be madness. I have enclosed this

envelope in another and enjoined you not to read it until March 5th.

Then it will be too late for you to come to me. If you came to-night,

you would find me hurrying out to meet you and to surrender. Duty would

Advertisement..

so gladly lay down its arms to Love, dear, and desert the fight.

"To-night I have slipped away from the uniforms, the tawdry mockery of a

puppet court, to find the pitiful comfort of rehearsing my heart-ache

to you, who own my heart. In my life here every hour is mapped, and I

seem to move from cell to cell. So many obsequious jailers who call

themselves courtiers stand about and seem to watch me, that I feel as if

I had to ask permission to draw my breath. Out in the narrow streets of

this little picture town, I see dark-skinned, bare-footed girls. Some of

them carry skins of wine on their heads. All of them are poor. They also

are gloriously free. As they pass the palace, they look up enviously,

and I, from the inside, look out enviously. I know how Richard of the

Lion Heart felt when he was a prisoner in France, only I have not the

comfort of a Lion Heart, and it is not written in the book of things

that you shall pass outside and hear my harp--and rescue me.... One

little taste of liberty I give myself. It caused a terrible battle at

first, but I was stubborn and told them that if I was going to be Queen

I was going to do just what I wanted, and that if they didn't like it,

they could get some other girl to be Queen, so of course they let me....

There is an old half-forgotten roadway walled in on both sides that runs

through the town from this horrible palace to the woods upon the

mountain. There is some sort of foolish legend that in the old days the

Kings used to go by this protected road to a high point called Look-out

Rock, and stand there where they could see pretty much all of this

miserable little Kingdom and a great deal of the Mediterranean besides.

No one uses it now except me; but I do as often as I can steal away. I

dress in old clothes and take the little Inca god with me and no one

knows us. We slip off among the bowlders and pine trees where the view

is wonderful, and as his godship presides on a moss-covered rock and I

sit on the carpet of pine needles, he gives me advice. Somewhere in

these woods crowds of children live. They are very shy, and for a long

time looked at me wonderingly from big liquid eyes, but now I have made

friends with them and they come and sit around me in a circle and make

me tell them fairy stories....




Most Popular