“Anna, thank God! We can admit her: Anna is safe,” she said, and turned the key.
Anna opened the door, stood an instant on the threshold, contemplating us in silence; a faint smile hovered about her hard mouth. Then, without wasting words on futile warnings, she made fast the lock, deposited on the floor a dark lantern she had concealed under her apron, walked to the window, which she closed as best she could, and drew the curtains securely. Indeed, her precaution was not idle: through the silence of the outside world of night, muffled by the snow, but yet unmistakable, the tread of the first patrolling round now grew even more distinctly upon our ear, passed under the terrace, emphasised by an occasional click of steel, and died away round the corner. With the vanishing sound melted the new anxiety which had clutched me, and I blessed the falling snow which must have hidden again, as soon as registered, the tell-tale traces of my footsteps below.
Anna had listened with frowning brow; when all was still once more, she turned to the Princess, and briefly, but in that softened voice I remembered of old:
“I have told your ladies that you had bidden me attend to you this night, and that you must not be disturbed in the morning,” and then turned to me: “All is ready, sir; we have till noon before being discovered. And now, child,” she continued, as Ottilie, still closely clinging to my side, looked up inquiringly, “no time to lose; there is death in this for thy gracious lord, if not for us all as well.”
“What does she mean?” asked Ottilie, and seemed brought from a far sphere of bliss face to face with cold reality. “Oh, Basil, Basil, to leave me again!”
“Leave you! I will never leave you,” cried I, touched to the quick at the change which had come upon the proud spirit of my beloved; “but if you will not come with me, with your husband, if you fear the perils of flight, the hardships of the road, or even,” said I, though it was only to try her and taste once again the exquisite joy of loving, humble words from her lips, “if you cannot make up your mind to give up your high state here, to live as the wife of a simple gentleman, I am content to die at your side. But leave you, never again! Ah! my God, once was too much.”
She looked at me for a second with tender reproach in her tear-dimmed eyes and upon her trembling lips; then she answered with a simplicity that rebuked my mock humility:
“I am content to go with you, Basil, were it to the end of the world.”
At this I could not, in spite of Anna’s presence, but take her to my heart again, and the nurse, after watching us with a curious look of mingled pleasure and jealousy in her hollow eyes, suddenly and somewhat harshly bade us remember once more that time was short.