It was not merely personal kindness which had
so bound her to her Sovereign; it was the unacknowledged but felt
conviction, that Isabella had penetrated her secret feelings, with
regard to Arthur Stanley; and yet not a syllable of this had ever
passed the Queen's lips. Oh, true sympathy seldom needs expression,
for its full consolation to be given and received! The heart
recognizes intuitively a kindred heart, and turns to it in its sorrow
or its joy, conscious of finding in it, repose from itself. But only
a woman can give to woman this perfect sympathy; for the deepest
recesses, the hidden sources of anguish in the female heart no man can
read.
Engrossed as Isabella was by the mysterious information imparted by
Marie, indefinitely yet forcibly confirmed by her, then unusual,
knowledge of the past history of Spain, she was more easily satisfied
with Marie's hurried and hesitating account of her escape, than she
might otherwise have been. To proclaim her relationship with Father
Ambrose was ruin to him at once. He had been one, she said with truth,
who had received great obligations from her family, and had vowed
to return them whenever it should be in his power so to do; he had,
therefore, made the exertion to save her, and was about taking her to
her childhood's home on the frontiers of Castile, the only place, it
appeared to him, sufficiently secret to conceal her from Don Luis's
thousand spies; but that on the providential discovery of the real
murderer, and the seeming impossibility of ever seeing the King
himself in time--she paused.
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