"Your highness, a courier has arrived, with dispatches from the Duke of Savoy. They are so important as to require immediate attention, and he will deliver them to no hands but your own."
"Admit him," said Eugene, entering the drawing-room, and joining Laura, who had taken a seat before her easel, and was preparing to paint. "Shall I see the courier in my cabinet, or receive him here?" said he.
"Remain here, my dearest, and let me hear the sound of your voice." So saying, she drew the hangings together, and, in the deep embrasure of the bay-window, was entirely concealed from view. Gliding back into her seat, she raised her loring eyes to the canvas whereon she was painting a portrait of her Eugene.
"I shall never, never catch the expression of those wonderful eyes," said she to herself. "This is their color, but where is their heavenly light? How shall I ever transmit—"
She started, let fall her palette, and gazed, horror-stricken, at the hangings. She had heard a voice, the tones of which, she knew not why, made the blood freeze within her veins. These were the words she heard: "Here, your highness, are my dispatches." Words without significance, but Laura shivered from head to foot. With trembling hand, she parted the hangings and looked out.
There, in the centre of the room, stood Eugene, in the act of opening a sealed paper. For one moment, her eye rested tenderly upon the beloved image; then she glanced quickly at the person who stood by the door. He wore the Sardinian uniform, and stood in a respectful posture, his eyes cast down.
But Laura? She stared at his swarthy face and bloodless lips, the sunken cheeks, and beetle brow, with a strange repugnance that almost shaped itself into some old, forgotten dislike.
"I must have seen him somewhere," thought she, "and the dim remembrance of the countenance pains me terribly. If he would but speak again! I surely would recognize that voice—that voice which sounds to my ear like some retrospective agony of which I may have dreamed long years ago."
Eugene still held the paper. He had opened it, and was turning it in and out, with an expression of great surprise. "What am I to understand by this mystification?" said he.
"Your highness," returned the courier, "the dispatches are secret, and written with sympathetic ink. If you will hold them over a light until a vapor begins to rise from them, the writing will appear."