I am happy. Bend your head down, and lay your lips on mine
once. You are my own!--death is sweeter than life!"
And before sunrise he died.
Some shadow from that fatal and tragic midnight marriage rested on her
still. Though she was blameless, some vague remorse ever haunted her;
though she had been so wholly guiltless of it, this death for her sake
ever seemed in some sort of her bringing. Men thought her only colder,
only prouder; but they erred. She was one of those women who, beneath
the courtly negligence of a chill manner, are capable of infinite
tenderness, infinite nobility, and infinite self-reproach.
A great French painter once, in Rome, looking on her from a distance,
shaded his eyes with his hand, as if her beauty, like the sun dazzled
him. "Exquisite--superb!" he muttered; and he was a man whose own ideals
were so matchless that living women rarely could wring out his praise.
"She is nearly perfect, your Princesse Corona!"
"Nearly!" cried a Roman sculptor. "What, in Heaven's name, can she
want?"
"Only one thing!"
"And that is----"
"To have loved."
Wherewith he turned into the Greco.
He had found the one flaw--and it was still there. What he missed in her
was still wanting.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE.
"V'la ce que c'est la gloire--au grabat!"
The contemptuous sentence was crushed through Cigarette's tight-pressed,
bright-red lips, with an irony sadder than tears.
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