Her Royal Lover: A Novel — page 350: what you’re looking at

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

342 HER ROYAL LOVER, from the worn envelope of this tender and sensitive heart life was slowly but surely retiring. The physicians, in order to reanimate this flame, nearly extinguished, had sent her to S——, a little sea-side resort on the Adriatic. There, far from all noise, she had rented a modest villa at whose base the waves broke. Whiter than the white dressing-gown in which she was as if enshrouded, she remained long hours lying upon her couch, admiring the boundless ex- tent of the waves which down there, very far down there, as far as her thoughts could exteud, were confounded with the sky. At other times when the weather was fine, the atmosphere pure and serene, they painfully transported her upon a terrace of the little villa, and she remained there as long as her strength would permit her. Her visage, completely emaciated by the con- tusions of her tears, all pale with the too well- known lines of death, disappeared under a mantilla of Spanish lace. With love and pity, this dying mother was eagerly regarding her son, this son so feeble that it seemed as though the robust arms of his Venetian nurse must crush him like a blade of grass. The expression of this little face, completely blue with the destard, which he had inherited from the sufferings of his mother, was angelic, as if it al- ready belonged to another sphere. Because the mother had been a victim and a martyr, this poor child, retained its life by a very slight breath; it was forever stamped with the seal of weakness and suffering. “Was it not enough then for her to suffer? was it still necessary to these inhuman exccutioners that the innocent should expiate and die,” Gomichooksscom ==