'I have no reason to suppose it either, but I think you are de guerre las before the battle is decided.'
'There is no battle possible for me. There is only a quite certain dishonour.'
His face was dark and weary. He spoke low and with effort. She glanced at him, and felt the vague awe with which strong unintelligible emotion always filled her.
'You must judge the question for yourself,' she said with a little hesitation. 'I will express what you wish to my niece if you really desire it.'
'You are always so good to me,' he murmured, with some agitation, and he bent down before her and reverently kissed her little white hands.
'God be with you, sir,' she said, with tears in her own tender eyes.
'You have been so good to me,' he murmured; 'the purest hours of my worthless life have been spent at Hohenszalras. Here only have I known what peace and holiness can mean. Give me your blessing ere I go.'
In another moment he had bowed himself from her presence, and the Princess sat mute and motionless in the sun. When she looked up at the great feudal pile of the Schloss which towered above her, it was with reproach and aversion to that stone emblem of the great possessions of its châtelaine.
'If she were a humbler woman,' she thought, 'how much happier she would be! What a pity it all is—what a pity! Of course he is right; of course he can do nothing else. If he did do anything else the world would condemn him, and even she very likely would despise him—but it is such a pity! If only she could have a woman's natural life about her——This life is not good. It is very well while she is young, but when she shall be no longer young?'
And the tender heart of the old gentlewoman ached for a sorrow not her own; and could she have given him a duchy to make him able to declare his love, she would have done so at all costs.