Augustus sighed.
“We need not raise the question of Patkul,” he said, with the evasion of weakness.
“We must,” replied the Countess. “For I believe it will be the first thing the King of Sweden will demand, and we must know how to answer him.”
Augustus did not speak; he did not think it possible that he could ever come so low as to deliver the man who trusted him to his enemy, but he thought that Karl might be pacified with some apparent submission and Patkul saved nevertheless.
“As you said yourself,” continued Aurora, “matters are desperate, and we cannot pause for niceties.”
She cared nothing herself for anyone but the man who, at once her master and her slave, was essential to her power and therefore to her happiness; the terrors of war, the miseries of the peasantry, the sufferings of the civilian populace, the bloodshed, the families ruined, the lands laid desolate, did not touch Aurora von Königsmarck; her gay and volatile nature did not even glance at the dark side of life.
Already, in this bitter crisis, her spirits were rising at the thought of the new exciting and brilliant part she intended to play with so much success.
Patkul was to her but a pawn in an elaborate and delicate game, and she had completely forgotten Hélène D’Einsiedel.
She went up to Augustus and laid her proud head against the laces on his breast; tall as she was she hardly reached to his heart.
Clasping him tightly in her lovely arms, and looking up at him, all soft and smiling, she whispered: “I will be your envoy to Karl of Sweden!”