A single glance was sufficient to show her that the gummed address label had been penned by Count Carl Leitolf’s own hand. Her heart beat quickly as she cut the string and opened the packet, to find within a book—a dull, uninteresting, philosophical treatise in German. There was no note or writing of any kind.
She ran through the leaves quickly, and then stood wondering. Why had he sent her that? The book was one that she certainly could never read to understand. Published some fifteen years before, it bore signs of not being new. She was much puzzled.
That Leitolf had a motive in sending it to her she had no doubt. But what could it denote? Again and again she searched in it to find some words or letters underlined—some communication meant for her eye alone.
Presently, utterly at a loss to understand, she took up the brown-paper wrapping, and looked again at the address. Yes, she was not mistaken. It was from Carl.
For a few moments she held the paper in her hand, when suddenly she detected that the gummed address label had only been stuck on lightly by being wetted around the edge, and a thought occurred to her to take it off and keep it, together with the book.
Taking up the large ivory paper-knife, she quickly slipped it beneath the label and removed it, when to her astonished eyes there were presented some written words penned across the centre, where the gum had apparently been previously removed.
The words, for her eye alone, were in Carl’s handwriting, lightly written, so that they should not show through the label.
The message—the last message from the man who loved her so fondly, and whose heart bled for her in her gilded unhappiness—read:—
“Adieu, my Princess. I leave at noon to-day, because you have willed it so. I have heard of what occurred last night. It is common knowledge in the palace. Be brave, dear heart. May God now be your comforter. Recollect, though we shall never again meet, that I shall think ever and eternally of you, my Princess, the sweet-faced woman who was once my own, but who is now, alas! lost to me for ever. Adieu, adieu. I kiss your hand, dear heart, adieu!”
It was his last message. His gentle yet manly resignation, the deep pathos of his farewell, told her how full of agony was his own heart. How bitter for her, too, that parting, for now she would stand alone and unprotected, without a soul in whom to confide, or of whom to seek advice.