Her Royal Lover: A Novel — page 46: what you’re looking at

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

38 HER ROYAL LOVER. born to enliven that fireside and bring to the mother the joys that the wife had sought in vain; for Najeska was not happy! And she would have asked, however, nothing better than to be so, if her husband had been less jealous, less suspicious! Notwithstanding the admirers which her beauty unceasingly attracted, notwithstanding the wicked tongues whose hatred endeavored to tarnish this star who eclipsed them, the young woman had re- mained faithful to the duties of the wife. At the epoch where our narrative commences, thirteen months of married life had passed over the heads of the Prince and Princess of Mineleko, whose primitive characters were scarcely modified. Notwithstanding the circumstances, Najeska Ivanowna, married, had remained that which we have seen her, a young girl—gay, lively, always covetous of the pleasures that her youth had not yet tasted. She was still the ingenuous child that Mon- sieur de Mineleko had married. On the contrary, the prince experienced the effects of the very difficult politics which, in these later days, agitated entire Kurope; his disposition, instead of becoming more genial at the contact of those three beings who adorned his home, only became more peevish and morose. Unconscious of the love that Heiligenthal had en- tertained for the princess, Mineleko suffered, how- ever from a fixed idea. This child that he had married, whom he ardently loved, could care nothing for him, man of an already mature age, with the black and correct whiskers of an advocate, with shaven lips covered by short blue hair. He fully realized that he possessed no remarkable Gomme JOO KSA (E(0)