the monotony of the days, occasional glimpses of the magnificent court pageants at Naples, and rare visits to the somber ancestral home on the Alban Lake. But the mind of the thoughtful maiden was more in harmony with the quiet scenes among which most of her days were passed, and had taken its permanent tone when the youthful lovers were married at about eighteen, or possibly nineteen. Two or three years of unclouded happiness, and this idyllic life came to an end. The marquis was called to the army, and the devoted wife saw him only at long intervals during his brilliant career, which he closed some fifteen years later with a tarnished name. The blow that shattered the hopes of Vittoria came near costing her life. In the first agony of her grief she fled to a convent, and wished to take the veil of a nun; but she was too valuable in her own sphere to be lost to the world, and Clement VII forbade it. Her only resource was to consecrate herself to the memory of one she never ceased to call _mio bel sole_, to religion, and to matters of the intellect. How she reconciled her undying love with the faithless and treacherous character of her Spanish husband, who was willing to sell his loyalty for a kingdom, we do not know. That she was ignorant of his disgrace is not probable. She had given him high counsel, putting honor and virtue above titles and worldly grandeur, and saying that she had no wish to be the wife of a king, since she is already the wife of a captain who has vanquished kings, not only by his bravery, but by his magnanimity. But she had, to a marked degree, the fine idealism that gives vitality to a sentiment. It is shown in the poise of the shapely head, in the broad, high, speculative forehead that hid a wealth of imagination and exalted feeling, in the large, soft, penetrating dark eyes, lighted with sensibility, which relieved the delicately chiseled features and firm but beautiful mouth from a tinge of asceticism. She was tall, stately, and graceful, with a fair, variable face of pure outlines, and hair of Titian gold. Her picture is one of a rare woman, capable of high thought, great generosity, great sacrifice, and great devotion. This love of her youth was interwoven with every fiber of her being. The child with whom she had wandered hand in hand by the sea; the youth who had responded to her every taste and thought, poetic like herself, proud, accomplished, handsome, and knightly; the man who had whiled away the hours of his captivity in writing for her a rather stilted Dialogue of Love, were alike transfigured in her memory. If she heard that he was a traitor, probably she did not believe it, and the very fact of unmerited disgrace would have been an added claim upon her affection. She was young, and naturally slow to think that an act which Pope and cardinals had assured him was quite consistent with the finest honor could be treasonable at all, though she had a keen moral sense