"I do not see," he said, "where this is to end. If the king does not wish--and I believe he really does not wish--that a sheet of paper, which they call a constitution, should rise between him and the people, according to which he is forced to govern, whether he will or not, then he ought not to have conjured up even the shadow of a constitution. The shadow is soon followed by the substance. I confess that I am disgusted by the patience of the king, while these fellows cry so loud; and that I have long doubted whether I could honorably serve a monarch who thus misjudges the duty of a king 'by the grace of God.'" When the prince was thus judging things by the standard of his Russian ideas of absolute government, it sometimes happened that there arose in Helen's naturally good and affectionate heart a repugnance, not unmixed with terror, towards one who could utter such inhuman thoughts in cold blood. At other times she would have shrunk from the fearful consequences of such principles, but now she was too deeply irritated by the wound which Oswald's treachery had inflicted on her proud heart, and, as is the case with violent dispositions, she had hastened from one extreme to the other. Helen hated Oswald. She wept tears of indignation and of shame when she thought how dear this man had been to her, and how near she had been to the danger of showing him her love for him. The treachery itself was no longer doubtful to her mind. Emily's manner had changed so strikingly of late that even outsiders had noticed it. The young lady who had formerly found happiness only in the wildest turmoil of pleasure, now avoided society as much as she had formerly sought it; and when she could not escape from invitations to her former circles, she seemed to have only scoffing and scorn for all she had admired in other days. She declared that the officers were stupid, dancing a childish amusement, and a masked ball the height of absurdity. She treated the ladies with undisguised irony, and the men with open contempt, especially her husband, who did not know what to make of the strange change, and only discovered gradually the one fact, that of all the many foolish things which Albert Cloten had done in his time, the making of an accomplished coquette, like the "divine Emily Breesen," his wife, was beyond all doubt the most foolish. Most people laughed, and said: "It is a whim of the little woman's; she will soon come right again." Others, who were less harmless, said: "There is something behind that! When a young woman treats the whole world, not excluding her husband, _en canaille_, she does so only for the sake of a man who is himself her whole world." But they racked their brains in vain to find out who the lucky man could be. Some guessed it was young Count Grieben, who had formerly courted her; others, Baron Sylow; still others, even Prince Waldenberg; and only Helen Grenwitz knew that they were all mistaken, and that the object of Emily's love was not to be