love of liberty. At some moments her heart beat as strongly as if ten lives instead of one circled within her body, and every drop of that mighty stream revolted when she thought that she would have to stagnate and rot in idleness. But with a deep and strong determination she constantly repeated:
“Rather a gradual death of a hundred years in the convent than a life of luxury and splendor against my conviction of duty.”
And when bodily weakness abated the struggle, she sadly gazed about the room in which she had been born and brought up, and whose walls lied about her glorious future. Her eyes, wandering from one picture to another, were not bidding farewell to her enormous wealth, but to liberty and nature; and then Maria Felicia wept bitterly. She wept not because she was not to dwell in those castles and cities as their mighty mistress, but because she never more would see the spring on the meadows, hear the grove rustle, the rivers murmur, see the golden harvest on the
