She was dead; she had died of grief, for she had felt that the man for whom she had sacrificed every thing—­her youth, her honor, and her duty—­despised her, and could never forgive her for having cheated him into taking her for his wife.  She died the victim of his contempt and hatred.  Not suddenly, not as with a lightning-stroke, did his contempt kill, but slowly and steadily did it pierce her heart.  She bore the torture for one desolate, disconsolate year, and then she died solitary and forsaken.  No loving hand dried the death-sweat on her cold forehead; no pitying lips whispered words of love and hope to her; yet on her death-bed, her heart was still warm toward her husband, and even then she blessed him.

A letter written by her trembling hand in her last hours, full of humble, earnest love, of forgiving gentleness, which her husband the prince found on his writing-table, as well as another, directed to Elise Gotzkowsky, and enclosed in the first, bore witness to this fact.

Lodoiska had loved her husband sufficiently to be aware of the cause of his wild and extravagant life, to know that in the bottom of his heart he was suffering from the only true love of his life—­his love for Elise; and that all the rest was only a mad and desperate effort to deaden his feelings and smother his desire.

Elise’s image followed him everywhere; and his love for her, which might have been the blessing of a good man’s life, had been a cruel curse to that of a guilty one.  In the midst of the wild routs, the private orgies of the imperial court, her image rose before him from these waves of maddening pleasure as a guardian angel, hushing him often into silence, and stopping the wanton jest on his quivering lips.

At times during these feasts and dances, he was seized with a boundless, unspeakable dread, a torturing anxiety.  He felt inexpressibly desolate, and the consciousness of his lost, his wasted existence haunted him, while it seemed as if an inner voice was whispering—­“Go, flee to her! with Elise is peace and innocence.  If you are to be saved, Elise will save you.”

But he had not the strength to obey the warning voice of his heart; he was bound in gilded fetters, and, even if love were absent, pride and vanity prevented him from breaking these bonds.  He was the favorite of the young empress, and the great of the empire bowed down before him, and felt themselves happy in his smile, and honored by the pressure of his hand.  But every thing is changeable.  Even the heart of the Empress Catharine was fickle.

One day the Prince Stratimojeff received a note from his imperial mistress, in which she intrusted him with a diplomatic mission to Germany, and requested him, on account of the urgency of the occasion, to start immediately.