"Say no more, say no more," said the pale empress, crossing herself. "You speak with such an air of conviction, that for a moment I too seemed to see this dreadful dream. When had you your dream?"
"In the autumn of 1760, your majesty."
The empress said nothing. She imprinted a kiss upon the forehead of the infants, and hastily withdrew to her own apartments.
"I will pray, I will pray!" sobbed she. "Perhaps God will have mercy upon us."
She ordered her private carriage and drove to St. Stephens, where, prostrate among the tombs of her ancestors, she prayed for more than an hour.
From this day Maria Theresa became sad and silent, anxiously watching the countenance of Isabella, to see if it betokened death. But weeks passed by, and the infanta's prophecy began to be regarded as a delusion only fit to provoke a smile. The empress alone remained impressed by it. She still gazed with sorrowing love at the pale and melancholy face of her daughter-in-law.
"You have made a convert of my mother," said the Archduchess Christina one day to Isabella, "although," added she, laughing, "you never looked better in your life."
"And you, Christina, you do not believe?" said Isabella, putting her arm around Christina's neck. "You, my friend, and the confidante of my sorrows, you would wish to prolong the burden of this life of secret wretchedness and dissimulation?"
"I believe in the goodness of God, and in the excellence of your own heart, dear Isabella. These three years once passed away, as soon as you will have been convinced that this prophecy was indeed nothing but a dream, your heart will reopen to life and love. A new future will loom up before you, and at last you will reward the love of my poor brother, not by noble self-sacrifice, but by veritable affection."
"Would that you spoke the truth!" returned Isabella sadly. "Had my heart been capable of loving, I would have loved him long ago—him, whose noble and confiding love is at once my pride and my grief. Believe me when I tell you that in these few years of married life I have suffered terribly. I have striven with my sorrows, I have tried to overcome the past, I have desired to live and to enjoy life—but in vain. My heart was dead, and could not awake to life—I have only suffered and waited for release."