None knew quite aright the history of that marriage. Some were wont
to whisper "ambition"; and, when that whisper came round to her, her
splendid lips would curl with as splendid a scorn.
"Do they not know that scarce any marriage can mate us equally?" she
would ask; for she came of a great Line that thought few royal branches
on equality with it; and she cherished as things of strictest creed the
legends that gave her race, with its amber hair and its eyes of sapphire
blue, the blood of Arthur in their veins.
Of a surety it was not ambition that had allied her, on his death-bed,
with Beltran Corona d'Amague; but what it was the world could never
tell precisely. The world would not have believed it if it had heard the
truth--the truth that it had been, in a different fashion, a gleam of
something of the same compassion that now made her merciful to a
common trooper of Africa which had wedded her to the dead Spanish
Prince--compassion which, with many another rich and generous thing,
lay beneath her coldness and her pride as the golden stamen lies folded
within the white, virginal, chill cup of the lily.
She had never felt a touch of even passing preference to any one out of
the many who had sought her high-born beauty; she was too proud to be
easily moved to such selection, and she was far too habituated to homage
to be wrought upon by it, ever so slightly. She was of a noble, sun-lit,
gracious nature, she had been always happy, always obeyed, always
caressed, always adored; it had rendered her immeasurably contemptuous
of flattery; it had rendered her a little contemptuous of pain.
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