And that cloud remained on Thomas Seymour's brow. It sank down lower
and still lower. It soon overshadowed the happiness of Catharine's
love, and awakened her from her short dream of bliss.
What she suffered, how much of secret agony and silent woe she
endured, who can wish to know or conjecture? Catharine had a proud
and a chaste soul. She concealed from the world her pain and her
grief, as bashfully as she had once done her love. Nobody suspected
what she suffered and how she struggled with her crushed heart.
She never complained; she saw bloom after bloom fall from her life;
she saw the smile disappear from her husband's countenance; she
heard his voice, at first so tender, gradually harden to harsher
tones; she felt his heart growing colder and colder, and his love
changing into indifference, perhaps even into hate.
She had devoted her whole heart to love, but she felt day by day,
and hour by hour, that her husband's heart was cooling more and
more. She felt, with dreadful heartrending certainty, she was his
with all her love.
But he was no longer hers.
And she tormented her heart to find out why he no longer loved her--
what she had been guilty of, that he turned away from her. Seymour
had not the delicacy and magnanimity to conceal from her his inward
thoughts; and at last she comprehended why he neglected her.
He had hoped that Catharine would be Regent of England, that he then
would be consort of the regent.
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