Now the widower awoke to the exciting potentialities of his position as chief mourner, and to the realisation that a living ass might command more attention than a dead lioness. As executor to the mighty departed, it was his to rule, and thereby to take the credit for, the quality of the honours to be accorded her. He extracted, at least, some revivifying comfort from the process, some soothing flattery from the profuse condolences of his subjects. When the dead was declared great and unforgettable--and, indeed, whatever the personal trend of Louise Elizabeth’s ambition, her forceful character had left its stamp upon her times--he inhaled the incense as proffered to his own nostrils. His vanity swallowed the innumerable eulogies, monodies and elegiacs, extolling the deceased’s virtues, and, waxing fat upon them, like Jeshurun kicked. “Where, then,” ended one passionate encomiast, Frugoni, an abbé, “O, where, then, Death, is thy sting!” It is certain that, if it lay rankling in that bereaved heart, there was also much solace of honey to alleviate the pain it caused. In short the duke only took means according to his lights to forget his trouble; and what should we all do, under like circumstances, but so study to fight the brooding demon of morbidity? Did he find a wholesome diversion in discussing with la Coque the details of a mourning coat, the braided sorrow of its cuffs, the sad expressive disposition of its buttons, why grudge him that comfort simply because we ourselves could see none in it? If a man can find solace for his grief in cat’s-cradle, by all means let him play with strings. The two played with strings in another sense, composing between them a touching threnody, thick with the most harassing sobs and wails, to which their own tears responded plentifully. They enjoyed it all immensely in a sort of smug lugubrious way. His Highness looked double the man he had been after a week or two’s enjoyment of these softly melancholy preoccupations. To Isabella, standing wistful and sorrowful in the background, the improvement in her father’s spirits brought, with a greater ease on his account, some vague feeling of distress. She was glad to see him shed his despair for a healthier sentiment; yet she could not but marvel over the choice of the means he could adopt, and find sufficient, for the medicining of a sick soul. She tried to blind herself to the essential shallowness of the nature which could thus console its tragedy with sweetmeats; she tried to make allowances, to be steadfastly loyal to her own converted sense of duty; yet the conscious truth in her would not be so hoodwinked, or wholly justify to her the self-sacrifice of which she had been so lavish.