feeling, flew to you with all the impetuosity of a first passion.
Believe me, my Jane, when this long-missing nephew of my husband
came and snatched away from me his hereditary estate, and, as the
lord, took possession of it, then the thought that I must leave you
and your father, the neighboring proprietor, was my only grief. Men
commiserated me on account of my lost property. I thanked God that
He had relieved me of this load, and I started for London, that I
might at last live and feel, that I might learn to know real
happiness or real misery."

"And what did you find?"

"Misery, Jane, for I am queen."

"Is that your sole unhappiness?"

"My only one, but it is great enough, for it condemns me to eternal
anxiety, to eternal dissimulation. It condemns me to feign a love
which I do not feel, to endure caresses which make me shudder,
because they are an inheritance from five unfortunate women. Jane,
Jane, do you comprehend what it is to be obliged to embrace a man
who has murdered three wives and put away two? to be obliged to kiss
this king whose lips open just as readily to utter vows of love as
sentences of death? Ah, Jane, I speak, I live, and still I suffer
all the agonies of death! They call me a queen, and yet I tremble
for my life every hour, and conceal my anxiety and fear beneath the
appearance of happiness! My God, I am five-and-twenty, and my heart
is still the heart of a child; it does not yet know itself, and now
it is doomed never to learn to know itself; for I am Henry's wife,
and to love another is, in other words, to wish to mount the