"Dear," she murmured, "you have not forgotten Theresa! You know she keeps troth! Aye, and will keep it till God grows kind, and your true wife can follow—to tell you how well she hath kept her charge!"
Awhile she was silent, and then she went on in the low even voice of self-communing.
"What to me is it to become a princess? Did not he, for whose words alone I cared, call me his queen? And I was his queen. In the black blank day of my uttermost need he made me his wife. And I am his wife. What want I more with dignities?"
Theresa von Lynar was silent awhile and then she added—
"Yet the young Duchess, his daughter, means well. She has her father's spirit. And my son—why should my vow bind him? Let him be Duke, if so the Fates direct and Providence allow. But for me, I will not stir finger or utter word to help him. There shall be neither anger nor sadness in my husband's eyes when I tell him how I have observed the bond!"
Again she kissed a hand towards the dead man who lay so deep under the ponderous marble at Kernsberg. Then with a gracious gesture, lingeringly and with the misty eyes of loving womanhood, she said her lonely farewells.
"To you, beloved," she murmured, and her voice was low and very rich, "to you, beloved, where far off you lie! Sleep sound, nor think the time long till Theresa comes to you!"
She turned and walked back facing the storm. Her hood had long ago been blown from her head by the furious gusts of wind. But she heeded not. She had forgotten poor Max Ulrich and Joan, and even herself. She had forgotten her son. Her hand was out in the storm now. She did not draw it back, though the water ran from her fingertips. For it was clasped in an unseen grasp and in an ear that surely heard she was whispering her heart's troth. "God give it to me to do one deed—one only before I die—that, worthy and unashamed, I may meet my King."
When Theresa re-entered the hall of the grange the company still sat as she had left them. Only at the lower end of the board the three captains conferred together in low voices, while at the upper Joan and Prince Conrad sat gazing full at each other as if souls could be drunk in through the eyes.
With a certain reluctance which yet had no shame in it, they plucked glance from glance as she entered, as it were with difficulty detaching spirits which had been joined. At which Theresa, recalled to herself, smiled.