your husband fill the palace with
his jealous complaints, and thus publishing to St. Petersburg and all
the world your unfaithfulness and criminal intrigues. Oh, I tell you I
see through this generalissimo, I know all his plans and secret designs.
He would gladly be able to convict you of infidelity to him--then, with
the help of the army he commands, declare his criminal wife unfit for
the regency, and then make himself regent! He has a cunningly devised
plan, but which my superior cunning shall bring to naught! I will play
him a trick!--But no, I will tell you no more now! At the right time you
shall know all. Now, Princess Anna, now answer me one question. Do you,
then, so very much love this Count Lynar?"

The princess looked up with a dreamy smile. "Do I love him!" she then
murmured low. "Oh, my God, Thou knowest how truly, how glowingly my
heart clings to him. Thou knowest that of all the world I have never
loved any other man than him alone! And you, Julia, you who know every
emotion and palpitation of my heart, you yet ask me if I love him--when
he stood before me in all his proud manly beauty, with his conquering
glance, his heart-winning smile? Ah, my whole heart already then flew to
meet him. I revelled in the sight of him, I thought only of him, I spoke
to him in my thoughts, and my prayers, I loved only when I saw him; and
that happy, that never-to-be-forgotten day when he confessed his love,
when he lay at my feet and swore eternal truth to me--ah, why could I
not have died on that day? I was then _so_ happy!"

"Poor Princess Anna," said Julia, sympathetically, "they soon grudged
you that happiness!"

"Yes," continued Anna with a bitter smile, "yes, the virtuous Empress
Anna blushed in the arms of her lover, Biron, at this aberration of
her sold and coupled niece. She found it very revolting that the poor
sixteen-year-old Anna Leopoldowna dared to have a heart of her own and
to feel a real love. They must therefore rob her of the only happiness
Heaven had vouchsafed her. Consequently, they wrote to Warsaw, asking,
nay, commanding the recall of the ambassador, and Lynar was compelled to
leave me."

"Ah, I well know how unhappy you were at that time," said Julia,
pressing the hand of the princess to her bosom; "how you wept, how you
wrung your hands--"

"And how I nowhere found mercy or commiseration," interposed Anna, with
bitterness, "neither on earth nor in heaven. I was and remained
deserted and s