Her Royal Lover: A Novel — page 296: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

288 HER ROYAL LOVER. endeavor to conceal it from his mother-in-law, ex- tended the missive to her. The empress read it from one end to the other. “To this,” said she, with her harsh, abrupt voice, “you must respond by a demand for a divorce.” “But a divorce cannot be obtained without a cause!” “This creature” (with whata contemptuous tone was this word pronounced!) “is a wretch; with- out that she would never have succeeded in circum- venting you thus. Certainly, it will be easy in delving in her past, to find a thousand indiscretions which will be all-powerful reasons to annul this accursed marriage, and itis not doubtful that the tribunals will grant your cause.” Poor Najeska Ivanowna! her only infamies, so ve- hemently reproached, consisted in that radiant beauty, that infinite charm, with which without even desiring it, she won all hearts. The empress, while haranguing. while storming thus, was forgetting that the King of Thessaly, very near to his fiftieth year, was mature enough to be regarded as capable of knowing what he wished to do; he was no longer at that age in which inex- perience and credulity may be deceived. Certainly they could never invoke his juvenility, his naivette, as extenuating circumstances. “You must send for Haller immediately, and learn his opinion. It is he who will preside at the tribunal, who will pronounce the judgment; ah well! we must dispose him in favor of our just cause.” By those few words the empress condemned her- self; for if the cause was so just, why did she think to dispose the judge in her favor? The king did not re- spond. In his own mind he felt how ridiculous his im- m Gomicbooks,co