“I have heard how you stand between two suitors and that wretched treaty. My heart has ached to tell you how I pity you.”
“It is not pity I need, but courage. Pity will not aid me in my duty, Mr. Lorry. It stands plainly before me, this duty, but I have not the courage to take it up and place it about my neck forever.”
“You do not, cannot love this Lorenz?” he asked.
“Love him!” she cried. “Ach, I forget! You do not know him. Yet I shall doubtless be his wife.” There was an eternity of despair in that low, steady voice.
“You shall not! I swear you shall not!”
“Oh, he is a prince! I must accept the offer that means salvation to Graustark. Why do you make it harder with torture which you think is kindness? Listen to me. Next week I am to give my answer. He will be here, in this castle. My father brought this calamity upon Graustark; I must lift it from the people. What has my happiness to do with it?”
Her sudden strength silenced him, crushed him with the real awakening of helplessness. He stood beside her, looking up at the cold monastery, strangely conscious that she was gazing toward the same dizzy height.
“It looks so peaceful up there,” she said at last.
“But so cold and cheerless,” he added, drearily. There was another long silence in which two hearts communed through the medium of that faraway sentinel. “They have not discovered a clue to the chief abductor, have they?” he asked, in an effort to return to his proper sphere.
“Baron Dangloss believes he has a clue—a meager and unsatisfactory one, he admits—and to-day sent officers to Ganlook to investigate the actions of a strange man who was there last week, a man who styled himself the Count of Arabazon, and who claimed to be of Vienna. Some Austrians had been hunting stags and bears in the north, however, and it is possible he is one of them.” She spoke slowly, her eyes still bent on the home of the monks.