On Louis thanking the minister for his generous interference, Sinzendorff took his hand.
"I will always bear my testimony to the fair dealing of the son, and to the disinterested conduct of the father, though we should never meet again."
Even while the words were on the lips of the chancellor, a message arrived from the Empress to Louis, to hasten his attendance at the Altheim apartments.—He smiled gloomily, in answer to Sinzendorff's smile of dubious meaning.
"I had forgotten!" said the chancellor, "you have yet a fair bond to Vienna; and this need not be a parting day."
"It is a portentous day, of most unpropitious nuptials!" replied Louis, hardly knowing what he uttered; "but every day, and every where, I must be honoured in the approbation of Count Sinzendorff."
The hour was beyond the time in which he ought to have been in the imperial boudoir, to await the hand of his intended bride. What change in her wishes, his changed fortune might produce, he thought not of. In a postscript to his father's letter, he had found hastily written:
"Events prove that you have done right with regard to the Empress's friend, if she is now your wife." This approbation, was a new bond on the sacrifice; and he threw himself into his carriage, to obey the peremptory summons of Elizabeth!
All was solitude in the first three chambers of the Altheim apartments. As he hurried forward with the desperate step of a man, who had lost so much that the last surrender was a matter of no moment, he saw the Empress in the fourth; but she sat alone. Louis bowed at the entrance, and again as he drew near. She was pale as himself; and did not look up while she addressed him.
"You are come, thus tardily, to ratify your vows? To redeem your pledged honour?"
"I come to obey Your Majesty's commands," replied he.