The response came swift and involuntary. The soldier gasped, having made it. “You will stop the coach, and return to your duty,” said the King, blue in the face. The former commotion was repeated; the physician returned to his patient; the cavalcade rolled on. His Majesty spoke not a single word further, but sat staring from the window. It was deep dusk now without, and the lightning flickered with a ghastlier brilliancy. But still the King would give no order to have the lamps lighted. Instead, he lay with his livid face and protruding eyes addressed to the heavens and the horror of a thought incessant in his mind. _The road was open to her at last, and she was driving to cut him off from Osnabrück, the city in which he had been born._ She knew that a man could not die in the room where he was born; and she was coming to forestall him with the dread summons to appear before his Maker, and answer for the thing he had done. * * * * * Much agitated, von Gastein remounted his horse, and spurred on to his place in the front. He did more; he drove ahead of all, and took the lead on the solitary road making for Osnabrück. The lights of the city were already faintly starring the distance, when a sound coming from in front startled and then thrilled him. Swift wheels, and the hoofs of a tearing horse! There was nothing uncommon in that; and yet his heart went cold to hear it. “God have mercy on me!” he muttered: “I am a fool!” Nearer and nearer came the sound--it was close--it was upon him--and there rushed past the shadow of a cabriolet, with a wild woman on the seat flogging a wild black horse. The night of her hair streamed behind like a thin cloud dusted with diamonds, and there was a frenzy of triumph in her eyes, and on her lips a smile. And so she passed and was gone. The Captain turned his horse’s head, and drove back upon the van. “Stop her!” he yelled. “In God’s name stop her Highness before too late!” They were jogging on leisurely, and thought him drunk or demented. “What Highness, Captain?” they said. “There has been none passed this way.” And on the word there came a loud cry from the rear, and for the third time the cavalcade halted. But von Gastein had sped by like the wind, and reached to where the royal carriage was stopped amid a little cloud of equerries; and a dismayed, small figure stood upon the step by the open door. “His Majesty,” said the physician, gasping over his words, “has had a stroke, and is dead!” George III His Majesty King George III stood gazing from a corridor window of the royal palace. For all practical purposes he was alone, and the equerries and others attendant on the sovereign presence flitted almost as remote in actuality as they figured to his mental vision. They were shadows, no more--little blots of bile, too minute to intercept his view of things, though collectively, as denoting a bodily condition, a source of irritation.