'We will drink that wafer together, and as long as we are together it will never be bitter, I think,' she said very softly.
Her voice seemed to sink into his very soul, so much it said of faith, so much it aroused of remorse.
Then the great joy which had entered his life, like a great dazzling flood of light suddenly let loose into a darkened chamber, so blinded consumed, and intoxicated him, that he forgot all else; all else save this one fact—she would be his, body and soul, night and day, in life and in death for ever; his children borne by her, his life spent with her, her whole existence surrendered to him.
For some days after that she mused upon the possibility of rendering him entirely independent of herself, without insulting him by a direct offer of a share in her possessions. At last a solution occurred to her. The whole of the fiefs of Idrac constituted a considerable appanage apart; its title went with it. When it had come into the Szalras family by marriage, as far back as the fifteenth century, it had been a principality; it was still a seigneurie, and many curious feudal privileges and distinctions went with it.
It was Idrac now that she determined to abandon to her lover.
'He will be seigneur of Idrac,' she thought, 'and I shall be so glad for him to bear an Austrian name.'
'She herself would always retain her own name, and would take no other.
'We will go and revisit it together,' she thought, and though she was all alone' at that moment, a soft warmth came into her face, and a throb of emotion to her heart, as she remembered all that would lie in that one word 'together,' all the tender and intimate union of the years to come.
Her trustees were furious, and sought the aid of the men of law to enable them to step in and arrest her in what they deemed a course of self-destruction, but the law could not give them so much power; she was her own mistress, and as sole inheritrix had received her possessions singularly untrammelled by restrictions. In vain Prince Lilienhöhe spent his severe and chilly anger, Kaulnitz his fine sarcasm and delicate insinuations, and the Cardinal his stately and authoritative wrath. She was not to be altered in her decision.
Austrian law allowed her to give away an estate to her husband if she chose, and there was nothing in the private settlements of her property to prevent her availing herself of the law.