Her Royal Lover: A Novel — page 28: what you’re looking at

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

20 HER ROYAL LOVER. who, dving, left her a fine fortune. Arriving ata marriageable age, she had wedded a very young man, then a simple refrendary. Rare talents, seconded by an indefatigable love of work, had rapidly advanced this man in the career of the law which he had chosen; at the end of thirty years of a regular and incorruptible life, he found bimself on the highest round of the ladder of his profession ; he was judge of the court, then president of the supreme tribunal. Notwithstanding the high position that her hus- band had been able to make for her, Madame Haller was not happy. Consumed with ambition, she dreamed of nothing less than to obtain from the king the ennoblement of her husband, in order to be able to go to court and be treated there on the same footing of equality as the princesses and countesses. But, alas! her desire did not seem to he realized so promptly. If she was occasionally admitted to the palace, it was always in the ante-rooms, in the crowd of guests of the fifth rank on the occasion of an extraordinary fete. Among that enormous multi- tude she passed unperceived. Never had she assisted at the select reunions. From his most tender infancy, Conrad had always heard the lamentations of his mother: lamentations so often repeated that, even for this intelligent son, this prejudice which he had, if I may so express it, experienced the evil of in the bosom of his mother, had created in him a species of resentment which increased when, for an increase of misfortune, he was smitten with a young noble girl whose family refused her hand to him who had no other nobility than that of the heart. This circumstance only rendered still more eager the desire which they had (E(o)/ AA) (@ JOO ES (E(0)