“I thought that it was you, Alice,” he said softly, “and I have therefore come to tell you to—­”

With sudden movement she tore back her veil, and before the pale, beautiful countenance thereby revealed the Prince stepped back, as pale as death.

“You yourself?” he murmured.  “You, Ludovicka?”

“Yes, I, Ludovicka!  I come here in my maid’s dress,” said she, in a voice trembling with pain and emotion.  “I come to you, my beloved, to ask you whether you will desert me, leaving me in despair, affliction, and heart-sickness?  O Frederick, Frederick! how fearfully have I suffered this night!”

“And I?” murmured he softly.  “Have I not suffered too?”

“No,” she cried, “you have not suffered as I did, for you love me not as I love you—­you love me not more than your life, your honor, your fatherland!  You will abandon and forsake me, because it is France that has offered us aid!  Oh, you are a cold, heartless man, as all men are, and yet I love you so much and can not live without you!  Frederick William, you will not go with me to France—­well then, I will go with you, wherever you will.  I cleave to you—­I will stay with you!  Let shame and ignominy be my fate, let my mother curse me, let all the world despise me and call me your mistress, I will stay with you, for I love you and can not live without you!”

Passionately she extended her arms to him, love flaming in her glances.  But a darker shadow flitted across the Prince’s face, and he shrank back.

“God forbid, Ludovicka,” he said, “that misery and shame should ever come to you through me, that your mother should curse you for my sake!  We are both yet children, Ludovicka.  I felt right painfully last night that the first duty of children is to obey and reverence their parents.  Let us do our duty, Ludovicka!”

“That is,” replied she with swelling rage—­“that is to say, you give me up?  They have overcome your opposition, they have brought you back to obedience, to subjection?”

“No other than myself has done it, Ludovicka.”

“You?  You give me up?  Voluntarily?  And yet you swore that you loved me and me alone of all the world?”

“And I swore truly, Ludovicka.  I love you boundlessly!”

“And yet you will forsake me?”

“Yet I must do so, beloved!  I must forsake you, but God alone, who has witnessed my tortures this past night, knows what I suffer.  My father is solitary, my fatherland calls to me, and the first thing that I sacrifice on its altar is my love for you.  I can not marry you, Ludovicka, and God forbid that I should accept your love without marriage!”

“Words, nothing but words!” cried she indignantly.  “You would palliate your unfaithfulness, represent your fickleness of mind as magnanimity!  But I hear only one thing in your words—­you give me up, you renounce your love?”

“Yes!” he cried with a loud scream of pain—­“yes, I renounce my love!”