Unfortunately, some time before the queen's delivery, it became necessary for her husband to quit Cracow, in order to direct an expedition against his old enemies the Teutonic Knights. During his absence, he wrote a long letter, in which, after desiring that the happy event might be attended with all possible magnificence, he entered {156} into a minute detail of the devices and embroidery to be used in the adornment of the bed and chamber, particularly requesting that the draperies and hangings might not lack gold, pearls, or precious stones. This ostentatious display, though excusable in a fond husband and a powerful monarch about to behold the completion of his dearest wishes, was by no means in consonance with Hedwige's intense love of Christian simplicity and poverty. We find her addressing to her husband these few touching words, expressing, as the result proved, that presentiment of her approaching end which has often been accorded to saintly souls: "Seeing that I have so long renounced the pomps of this world, it is not on that treacherous couch--to so many the bed of death--that I would willingly be surrounded by their glitter. It is not by the help of gold or gems that I hope to render myself acceptable to that Almighty Father who has mercifully removed from me the reproach of barrenness, but rather by resignation to his will, and a sense of my own nothingness." It was remarked after this that the queen became more recollected than ever, spending whole hours in meditation, bestowing large alms, not only on the distressed of her own country, but on such pilgrims as presented themselves, and increasing her exterior mortifications; wearing a hair shirt during Lent, and using the discipline in a manner which, considering her condition, might have been deemed injudicious. She had ever made a point of spending the vigil of the anniversary of her early sacrifice at the foot of the veiled crucifix, but on this occasion, not returning at her usual hour, one of her Hungarian attendants sought her in the cathedral, then but dimly lighted by the massy silver lamp suspended before the tabernacle. It was bitterly cold, the wind was moaning through the long aisles, but there, on the marble pavement, in an ecstacy which rendered her insensible to bodily sufferings, lay Hedwige, she having continued in this state of abstraction from the termination of complin, at which she invariably assisted.