for the unprecedented crime."

"And has he fulfilled the vow?"

"He has. He has punished the conspirators, so far as lay in his power. But
some of them, for instance Baron von Moudenfels, do not belong to the
number of his subjects, but are Austrians. The emperor did not have the
sentence which he pronounced upon his own subjects executed upon them; he
could not at this time, for you know that negotiations for peace have been
opened, and the treaty will be signed immediately. So the emperor did not
wish to constitute himself a judge of Austrian subjects; it is a delicate
attention to the Austrian emperor, and the latter will know how to thank
him for it and to punish the criminals with all the rigor of the law.
Therefore Baron von Moudenfels and Count von Kotte have merely been held as
prisoners, and were compelled to witness the execution to-day."

"What execution?" asked Leonore in horror.

"Colonel Lejeune, Captain de Guesniard, and two sous-lieutenants were shot
this morning on the meadow at Schoenbrunn,"[E] said Schulmeister in a low
tone.

Leonore shuddered, and a deathlike pallor overspread her face. "And _I_
delivered them to death!" she moaned.

"And if you had spared them, you would have delivered the Emperor
Napoleon, the greatest man of the age, to death, to the most terrible
torture of imprisonment!" cried her father, shrugging his shoulders. "These
men wished to commit a crime against their sovereign, their commander. You
have no reason to reproach yourself for having delivered the criminals to
the law."

"And Mariage? What has become of Mariage?"

"Apparently he received a warning; he has fled. But we found all the others
yesterday at their posts; for we had made all our arrangements so secretly
that even the conspirators who surrounded the emperor were not aware of it.
The emperor at first intended to act strictly according to the programme of
the conspirators; take the ride with his suite, and not permit me to come
to his assistance, with a few trustworthy assistants, until after he had
entered the hut and been captured. But he rejected this plan, because he
would have been compelled to arrest his most distinguished generals and
subject the greater number of his staff officers to a rigid investigation.
The whole army would then have heard of this bold conspiracy, and
conspiracies are like contagious diseases, they always have successors. So
the emperor rejected this plan, and, at the moment that