"It would have been better to have awaited the young creature's coming out of prison, before you sent to request the Grand Duke to come here."
"Awaited! And do I know that the salutary crisis in which I now am will last until to-morrow? Perhaps I am but momentarily sustained by my ambition only."
"What proofs have you for the prince, and will he believe you?"
"He will believe me when he reads the commencement of, the disclosure which I wrote from the dictation of that woman who stabbed me,—a disclosure of which I have, fortunately, forgotten no circumstance. He will believe me when he reads your correspondence with Madame Séraphin and Jacques Ferrand, as to the supposed death of the child; he will believe me when he hears the confession of the notary, who, alarmed at my threats, will come here immediately; he will believe me when he sees the portrait of my daughter at six years of age, a portrait which the woman told me was still a striking resemblance. So many proofs will suffice to convince the prince that I speak the truth, and to decide him as to his first impulse, which will make me almost a queen. Oh, if it were but for a day, I could die content!"
At this moment a carriage was heard to enter the courtyard.
"It is he! It is Rodolph!" exclaimed Sarah.
Thomas Seyton drew a curtain hastily aside, and replied, "Yes, it is the prince; he is just alighting from the carriage."
"Leave me! This is the decisive moment!" said Sarah, with unshaken coolness; for a monstrous ambition, a pitiless selfishness, had always been and still was the only moving spring of this woman. Even in the almost miraculous reappearance of her daughter, she only saw a means of at last arriving at the one end and aim of her whole existence.
Seyton said to her, "I will tell the prince how your daughter, believed dead, was saved. This conversation would be too dangerous for you,—a too violent emotion would kill you; and after so long a separation, the sight of the prince, the recollection of bygone times—"
"Your hand, brother!" replied Sarah. Then, placing on her impassive heart Tom Seyton's hand, she added, with an icy smile, "Am I excited?"