since, he had cast him off from them | soon, so that we may get away from here altogether. He did not stop to ask, why quickly." the prompting to say this to Christopher? He only knew, he felt it was a sort of duty, a reparation he ought to make, and he would make it if he could get the strength to speak. "The brandy," he gasped: "in that cupboard there. Before she comes in give me some!"

Mr. Veriker, daily weaker, after that one effort, never returned to the subject again. The moment for speaking out "But nothing that I may not hear. I what was now locked up forever in his know what has made you come, Christo- breast- had passed by. Soothed by pher." He was shaking so that he could Christopher's presence and attentions, he hardly stand. She was looking at him began to feel he could not do without steadfastly. "Papa has told me. You him. To send him away was robbing want me to marry you, he says, and I himself of his only chance of life. When am quite willing. Only let it be very Christopher once hinted at the letter he VOL. XXXVIII. 1942

had given him, Mr. Veriker said he would¦ Mr. Veriker, who had promised to rest read it later. But the evening he had quietly until the return of the bride and received it he had put it away, and he bridegroom. Déjeuner would then be kept putting off the trouble of taking it served, and they would be in time for the out of his desk again. train which was to take them on to Ve

So the necessary preliminaries, entrust-rona. ed to Mr. Holton, an English notary, who resided at Venice, were ordered to be hastened on with all possible dispatch, and to Christopher at least the time went by swiftly.

To cover the under-current of emotion which oppressed them all, great interest was feigned in Mr. Blunt's letter, scraps from which, while waiting for Mr. Holton, Christopher went on reading.

"It is our squire," he said in explanation-"I left him very ill-who, my father says, is dying, and all the place is agog to know how he will leave his property."

The necessity of constant attendance on her father formed a sufficient excuse for Robin and him to be but little alone, and seeing how soon her care would be in vain, Christopher forbore to lure her from the watch she kept. It was only "No heir, then?" Robin who did not, could not, would not, "No children a nephew who has see the rapid decline in Mr. Veriker. A quarrelled with him. They have sent for mere hint that he did not seem so well him, though, it seems now. He is abroad brought down her displeasure on the somewhere." speaker. Lucky dog," sighed Mr. Veriker. The going away from Venice immedi-"Why ain't I that nephew?" ately after the marriage was the event which buoyed her up. Travelling had always agreed with him. He had never been ill while they were going about from one place to another, and as soon as the wedding was over, they were all three, the very same day, to start off, and begin by easy stages their journey to Spezzia, the place which Mr. Veriker had fixed on to go to; where he said he should like to stay, giving as a reason to Christopher that his wife lay buried there.

"Child, I don't fancy it would do me much good to go and see you married," Mr. Veriker said, the morning before the wedding-day. "Would you mind if we got Mr. Holton to act my part as father?" Not a bit; she did not mind. The ceremony she had to go through was a mere ceremony to her.

In the first few days after Christopher's arrival, Robin's couch had been watered nightly with tears of anguish and despair; but now, familiar with his presence, relieved by his thoughtfulness, never obtruded on by his advances, all this was passed sunk in the greater anguish which haunted her like a spectre, the unknown dread of something which, although she shut her eyes to it, she saw each hour stealing nearer.

Posted up as to the day when the marriage would take place, Mr. Blunt, still in high good humor, sent a substantial proof of his favor, together with a letter, from which Christopher improvised messages to Robin and her father.

The luggage was packed; all was ready. Madame Giacomuzzi was to look after

"Oh, I don't think you need wish to be: people don't seem to say much that is good about him, I fancy."

"So far as I ever discovered, nobody ever said anything good of me," and Mr. Veriker smiled feebly. "What's the name of this nephew?"

"Name!" said Christopher, whose thoughts were following Robin. "Oh, Chandos the squire's name."

Chandos," repeated Mr. Veriker. "Wasn't his name Chandos, Robin?" and he turned his head round to find she was not there.

"Robin has gone down-stairs," said Christopher. "I expect it's time for me to follow her."

Below, Robin was speaking to Madame Giacomuzzi. The woman held her by the hand. Her motherly heart yearned towards the girl.

Ah, it is not you she would have chosen," she said, addressing Christopher a few minutes later, as she stood watching them go, for Mr. Holton had joined them and they were walking towards the gondola. "She needed but to say 'I don't want Paolo,' and I knew about whom she was thinking," and she hugged the baby she was nursing closer and went to find a candle to set up before the picture of the Madonna.

Meanwhile Giacomuzzi came back from the steps. He had been keeping in readiness the gondola. The old waiter, in company with the sister who helped in the house duties, returned from the vantage-spots they had chosen. The marriage had made quite an excitement

among the household. Now they must call to mind their duties. Madame would go up and see after the signor. Would she then give him this letter? and Giacomuzzi took one from his pocket and gave her. It had come an hour ago. In the bustle he had forgotten to deliver it; but she need not say so.

ter

Madame Giacomuzzi

as she said af took up the letter, gave it to Mr. Veriker, who asked her to give him some water. There was none in the room, and she went to fetch it, and when, perhaps ten minutes later for something downstairs detained her she returned, she found Mr. Veriker lying back faint. But she had seen him faint often before, so she threw over his forehead some of the water and then thought she would burn under his nose some paper-alas! in her haste, the very letter; but he did not come to, so she called to Giacomuzzi, and he ran for the doctor, and the doctor came, and was still there when the wedding party returned, and Robin, flushed and trembling, ran up, close followed by Christopher.

Papa!" and then, seeing a crowd in the room, she made a rush forward. "Father! Father!" but some one intercepted her. "Father!" she screamed, and with all her might she struggled to get free.

"Hush! hush! he cannot hear you." Mr. Veriker lay dead. Beside him was a screwed-up bit of burnt paper.

From The Modern Review.

strain of royal blood now wears the crown of Britain. "The sovereign qualification was restored to the realm (at the accesssion of the house of Hanover) in its highest purity through the descendants of the Guelphs, passing back through the house of Este to connect themselves with some of the illustrious Roman Gentes. The new dynasty was, indeed, by centuries older in history than the Plantagenets." (Burton.) Elizabeth Stuart was born in Falkland Palace, 19th August, 1596; she died 13th February, 1662, in Leicester House, London.

Between birth and death, this descendant and ancestress of kings lived through many adventures, saw many men of mark in many foreign lands, experienced bitter sorrows, and passed through a strange life of royal romance. Princess, electress, queen, fugitive, and refugee, her career knew pomp and pleasure, penury and pain. After stormy alternations of rule and of reverse, the (titular) ex-queen of Bohemia returned from the Continent to England, to die there, generally neglected and half unknown. The years which elapsed between the period at which she quitted England as Electress Palatine, and returned to it a beauty. waning and distressed widow, discrowned and forlorn, embraced the terrible epoch of the Thirty Years' War; and Elizabeth's vivid memory was filled with vital images of the long agony of that most cruel civil and religious struggle. She had actually and intimately known the persons, intrigues, interests, of the great war; had seen many of the heroes, ad

ELIZABETH STUART, QUEEN OF BOHEMIA. Venturers, tyrants, of that woful time;

I.

had spoken with Gustavus Adolphus, Maurice of Nassau, Mansfeld, Christian ELIZABETH STUART, some time queen of Brunswick, and many other of the of Bohemia, and still titular Queen of notabilities of that distinctive epoch of Hearts; daughter of James I., and Anne history; had shared the somewhat heavy of Denmark; granddaughter of Mary splendors of the German courts of the Queen of Scots, fourth in descent from seventeenth century, and had experienced Margaret Tudor; sister of Prince Henry, the substantial comfort of the hospitable and of Charles I.; wife of the Winter-States-General in the great days of Holkönig; mother of the princes Rupert and Maurice, and of the electress Sophia; friend of Lord Craven — is the princess who took the blood royal of England and of Scotland to Germany, where it became blended with that of the Guelphs; the result being that Elizabeth's descendants, Stuarts on the spindle side, succeeded to the throne of England, after the last Stuart king had been deprived of the crown, and after his two daughters had died without leaving issue.

A direct descendant of this mixed

land. Around her image stand the figures, behind her glooms the sombre background, of that dire convulsion. The years over which her active life extended were of singular importance alike to the politics and to the religion of all Europe: A witness of, and an actress in, that supreme struggle between faiths and dynasties, Elizabeth lived in the very midst of the horror, the romance, the woe of that dæmonic strain and anguish of thirty years' duration. She saw the long process of that exhaustion of war-worn na

tions which dictated the peace of Westphalia; her own brother, after the civil wars of England, perished on the scaffold at Whitehall; she lived through the time of the Protectorate, and she witnessed the restoration of the royal line in England. Her life, and the times through which she lived, are surely subjects of surpassing interest for an historical essay. Of the sources of information about the Thirty Years' War it may well be said that their name is legion. The number of German authorities, the plethora of Continental records are, in truth, almost bewildering; but the writer about that complex time may well bear in mind Professor Masson's modest and pregnant saying: "I can never pass a sheet of the historical kind for the press without a dread, lest from inadvertance, or from sheer ignorance, some error, some blunder even, may have escaped me."

of Denmark was gay, pleasure-loving, cheerful, frivolous. James, fittest, by nature, to squabble with another mind of like calibre with his own about the trivalities of theology, was a monarch besotted with his own fatuous conception of the divine right of kings; and was unstable, pedantic, undignified, and unvirile. That he had a coward's cruelty, the fates of Arabella Stuart and of Sir Walter Raleigh amply prove. Ungainly in person, he was yet more unlovely in mind. Entering upon the noble inheritance of a reign which succeeded to that of Elizabeth, he alienated the nation from his dynasty, he prepared the great rebellion, he lowered England in the councils of Europe; and, while a most exasperating tyrant to people and to Parliament, he remained long the abject slave of Spain and of unworthy favorites. The best excuse, perhaps, for the pusillanimous king of England, who dared not look upon a drawn sword, consists in the fatal event which occurred while he was yet in his mother's womb. James and his daughter never came very near together; James and his son Henry drifted even farther and farther apart. It was inevitable that it should be so.

As the years rolled on, the question of the marriages of such a hopeful prince and princess began to press. "I would rather espouse a Protestant count than a Catholic emperor," said Elizabeth. In this, as in other things, she took her tone from her knightly prince brother, who opposed heartily a scheme for marrying him to the Infanta Anna of Spain, sister to that Infanta Maria whom his brother Charles afterwards pursued in Madrid with bootless courtship. Henry, indeed, proposed to accompany his sister to Germany, in order there to be able to remain purely Protestant, and to select and marry some Protestant princess.

The girlhood of Elizabeth, after her father's accession to the throne (1603), was passed chiefly at Combe Abbey, under the wise guardianship of Sir John, afterwards Lord Harrington, and of his wife. There she played, and studied, and became a mighty huntress. The influences which surrounded her youth were noble, kindly, natural. The Gunpowder Plot conspirators designed to seize her person, and to proclaim her queen after the murder of her father. They hoped to mould her tender youth to the religion of the Romish Church, and to obtain from such a sovereign Catholic supremacy in England. During the danger arising from the plot, the young princess was removed, temporarily, from Combe Abbey to Cov. entry; but after the execution of the conspirators she returned to the beloved home of her childhood. The great delight of her years of girlhood consisted in the tender friendship which subsisted between Elizabeth and her noble brother, At the suggestion of Maurice of Nasthe young Prince Henry; a prince of rare sau, a suitor for the hand of Elizabeth promise, "the expectancy and rose of the presented himself in the person of Frederfair State," who evinced in his early years ick, Pfalzgraf of the Rhine, and son of the a true sympathy with all that was noblest Kurfürst, or elector, of the Palatinate, in English life and thought. Henry, had Frederick IV. Frederick IV., who was he lived, would, probably, have been, like born in 1574, and married, 1593, Luise the last great Tudor monarch, an England- Juliane, daughter of William the Silent, a loving king, " more English than the En- noble daughter of a noble father, was the 'glish themselves," and in intimate and most considerable Protestant prince of instinctive union with the essence of the Germany. His territory did not equal in national life. Both Henry and Elizabeth importance that of Saxony, but the talwere convinced and ardent Protestants. ents, the character, and the zeal of FredBetween the royal children and their par- erick IV. soon placed him at the head of ents there was not there could not be - Protestant Germany. He took a leading much intimacy or close sympathy. Anne | part in founding the famous Protestant

Union in 1608; and was, indeed, the chief | who inherited much of her mother's light of the Union, which included among its and frivolous temperament. members the duke of Würtemberg, the Landgraf of Hessen-Kassel, and the Markgrafs of Anspach and of Baden Durlach. Frederick IV. died 18th September, 1610. The Protestant Union called into being the Catholic Liga, founded roth of July, 1609. The Union had many heads; the Liga only one, but that one was Maximilian of Bavaria, while its general was Tilly. Maximilian was unscrupulous, eager, crafty, energetic. A pupil of the Jesuits, and a bigoted Catholic, Maximilian knew well what he wanted, and he hesitated at no means that would serve his ends. He had the advantage, to a partisan, of a clear will, a ruthless cruelty, and a cunning audacity.