'I will go no further; speak now, or I leave you here.' Her voice was calm, though her hands were trembling a little.
'I am sent to tell you that your hour has come; that your ill-gotten power, your evil triumphs, are waning.' His voice was deep, sonorous, impressive.
'Who sends you?' she asked. Coming from the brilliantly lit rooms and the stir and noise of the ball, this sudden interlude in the still, moonlit garden, with the strange, sinister, black-robed figure, seemed to her like a dream.
'I am sent by one you have ruined, in the name of the many you have injured! and yet, in mercy, I bid you fly while there is time!' the stranger answered.
'Ah! Mercy? This is some absurd fiction; no one has mercy upon me,' she said bitterly.
'Yes, I have. I came to deliver my message, and yesterday I saw your entry into Ludwigsburg. I saw the peasants cruelly driven back by the soldiers' swords. I saw the great monument you have raised here to your shame, this mad, mock court of yours, and I hated you! but then I saw your youth, your beauty, and I vowed I would warn you, that you might carry this, your true wealth, to some atonement for your sins. I bid you fly; the Duke has information against you which must spell ruin for you—ruin and death.'
'You are mad,' she said quietly.
'No; I am not mad, unless compassion is madness.'
She drew off her mask, and, in the clear white moonlight, turned her face upon him—that strange, haunting face of hers, which Eberhard Ludwig said no man could forget.
'And so you had compassion because you saw me?' she laughed. 'Your mission is absurd, but I forgive you because some generous thought was yours even for the Grävenitzin.' She was all woman at that moment; the hard, cruel oppressor, the ruling Landhofmeisterin, was banished from her being, she was fascination incarnate.