XXIV
TRUE TO HER LOVE
VOLSENI forgave Sophy its dead and wounded sons. Her popularity blazed up in a last fierce, flickering fire. The guns were taken; they would not go to Slavna; they would never batter the walls of Volseni into fragments. Slavna might be defied again. That was the great thing to Volseni, and it made little account of the snakelike line which crawled over St. Peter's Pass, and down to Dobrava, and on to Slavna. Let Slavna—hated Slavna—reckon with that! And if the snake—or another like it—came to Volseni? Well, that was better than knuckling down to Slavna. To-night King Sergius was avenged, and Queen Sophia had returned in victory!
For the first time since the King's death the bell of the ancient church rang joyously, and men sang and feasted in the gray city of the hills. Thirty from Volseni had beaten a hundred from Slavna; the guns were at the bottom of the Krath; it was enough. If Sophy had bidden them, they would have streamed down on Slavna that night in one of those fierce raids in which their forefathers of the Middle Ages had loved to swoop upon the plain.
But Sophy had no delusions. She saw her Crown—that fleeting phantom ornament, fitly foreseen in the visions of a charlatan—passing from her brow
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