Nadeska shrugged her shoulders.
"What can you do? You know the count hates you as much as the prince. If he does not indulge his hate, and if he does not utter the single word which would part mother and son forever, it is not from fear of the disgrace--when has the count ever minded disgrace?--but from fear of poverty, which he hates still more. Let him find out to-day that his silence is to be no longer profitable to him, and to-morrow he will speak!"
The princess knew that her confidante was perfectly right, and she groaned like a tortured prisoner, pressing her thin hands upon each other.
"Oh, Nadeska! Nadeska!" she whined; "why did the count come home at that unlucky moment! Why did you leave your post at that very hour, which was the decisive hour? If I had only had five minutes' warning the count would have found me alone, and with all the suspicions he might have, there would have been no more evidence then than at any previous time."
Nadeska was standing by the side of her mistress and a little back of her. This enabled her to make a scornful face before she replied,
"Your grace will pardon me, but this time there was evidence, even without the sudden coming of the count. It was certainly an ugly accident that the birth of the prince took place just nine months after a strange man had thrown his father out of the window of his own bedroom!"
The remembrance of this tragi-comic accident dispelled for a moment the melancholy of the princess. The half-ludicrous, half-horrible scenes of that mad night passed very clearly before her mind's eye, and the image of the hero of the night--the man of the people, whom she, the high-born princess, had honored so highly--reappeared to her as he had appeared then, the beau ideal of exuberant vigor and manhood.
"I wonder if he is still alive?" she asked, quite lost in her recollection.
"Who, your grace?" asked Nadeska, who knew perfectly well of whom her mistress was thinking.
The princess made no reply, and Nadeska began noiselessly to light the candles in all the rooms. Gradually a voluptuous twilight spread over the salon in which the princess was, which grew brighter and brighter without losing its soft characters, for all the lights were burning in rosy shades. This was the only light which the irritable nerves of the princess could endure; and even during the day, which generally only began for her in the afternoon, the windows were invariably darkened with rosy curtains. Scoffers maintained that the princess avoided a bright light merely because her faded features and injured complexion could not well be exposed to bright day-light.