With movements as precise as his words he delivered the letters to the ladies. The Countess slipped hers into the bosom of her dress; the Princess's letter remained on her lap, on the back of the little dog.
Francis Junius kept a reserved silence, as if waiting his dismissal, while the young women whose husbands and brothers were fighting in the cause he preached gazed at him with wide eyes of sympathy and awe.
But Juliana of Stolberg wished to hear more of that country where now all her interests were so passionately centred.
"Tell us," she said, with a sad, gentle earnestness, "of the Netherlands."
The preacher flushed and started from his abstraction.
"Of the Netherlands?" he repeated. "Alas, I have seen nothing in the Netherlands you or any lady would care to hear."
"Do you think we are so weak-hearted?" smiled the Countess, pointing to the mourning of all. "What we have endured and what we must endure, our thoughts and our anxieties, serve to steel us."
Her lips trembled and she put out her hand to clasp the sympathetic hand of her daughter Catherine, which crept on to her knee.
"Did you see my son Adolphus before he died?" she asked in a firmer voice.
"No, Madame—but I have heard of the great honour he had in his death. And I heard that the Count Louis was doing very wonderfully and resolutely with his little means."