She must return to Varsovia and tell Augustus of her humiliation.
The future appeared to her desperate; she did not even care to think of it; this adamant and implacable prince clearly meant to conquer both Poland and Saxony.
Aurora saw her whole world tumbling into the dust of chaos; this man would be the master of her fate; and she could do nothing with him; he had looked at her with—first indifference, then contempt, and always as if she had been old and ugly.
In Augustus she had no hope; she knew that he was at the end of his resources, and he had no personal qualities with which to inspire confidence; she foresaw that his bewildered policies would lead to a total overthrow of his fortunes, and that his submission would partake of the nature of panic and thereby further gild the triumph of Karl.
She felt angry with her lover for the failure that had placed her in such a position of unendurable humiliation and insecurity.
In her bitterness, as she rode slowly along the hard lonely road, the cold skies above her and the unawakened landscape barren and still frozen about her, her dominant thought was a regret, almost passionate regret, that she had not attached her fortunes to those of a more successful man than Augustus of Saxony.
CHAPTER IV
THE unhappy Augustus went swiftly on the path of disaster; when Aurora von Königsmarck failed and returned making the best she could of a poor tale, the King-Elector appealed to the Diet still sitting at Varsovia, by means of one of his partisans, the Palatine of Marienbourg.
He asked that the army of Poland might be placed at his disposition, promising to pay the men two quarters in advance, and requested permission to bring to the defense of the country 12,000 Saxons.
Cardinal Radziekowski, Archbishop of Gnesne, Prime Minister of the Realm, and President of the Diet, the most powerful enemy of Augustus, and the most active partisan of the Sobieski, the family of the last King of Poland, was eager enough to seize this opportunity of insulting a king elected against his wish and who was an object of his keen personal dislike; the answer he returned to the Palatine of Marienbourg was dry and hard.