bly extinguished by women. Be
trustful, my Ludovicka, trustful, and pious, and let love, holy and still,
ardent and glowing, penetrate your heart, just as I do, without trembling,
without hesitancy, and without the fear of men."

"You love me, then, love me truly?" asked Ludovicka, tenderly clinging to
him.

"I love you with wrath and pain, love you with rapture and delight, love
you in spite of the whole world! I will know nothing, consider nothing,
hear nothing of the folly of the wise, of the irrationality of the
rational, of the stupidity of the sage. I will know nothing and hear
nothing, but that I love you! Just as you are, so cruel and so lovely, so
coquettish and so innocent, so passionate and yet so cold. Oh, you are an
enchantress, who has changed my whole being and taken possession of all my
thoughts and all my feelings. Formerly I loved my parents, feared my
father, respected my friend and early teacher, the faithful Leuchtmar,
listened to his counsels, followed his advice. But now all that is
past--all is swallowed up. I think only of you, only know you, only hear
you."

"And yet a day will come when I shall call upon you in vain, a day when
you shall no longer hear my voice."

"It will be the day of my death."

"No; the day when you leave this place. The day on which you return to
your native land to become there a reigning lord, and leave the poor
humbled Princess Ludovicka behind here deserted and alone."

"But you? Will you not go with me?" he asked, in amazement. "Will not my
country be yours? And if I am a reigning lord, will you not stand as
sovereign lady by my side?"

"I?" asked she, bewildered. "How do you mean? I do not understand you."

"I mean," he whispered softly, while he clasped her closely to himself--"I
mean that you shall accompany me as my wife."

"But!" cried she, smiling, and with an expression of radiant joy--"but you
have never said that I should be your wife."

"Have I not told you that I love you? Have I not been repeating to you for
a year that I love you? And does it not naturally follow that you and you
alone are to be my wife?"

"But they will not suffer it, Frederick!" cried she, with an expression of
pain. "No, they will never suffer you to make me your wife."

"Who will not suffer it, Ludovicka?"

"Your parents will not suffer it, and the great Lord von Schwarzenberg,
who rules your father, as my mother has told me, and Herr von Leuchtmar,
who rules you and-