Leonore slowly shook her head. “He must return,” she said solemnly.  “First I must see him again, have him tell me that he will go with me to that distant region.  What would all the treasures of the earth avail, if I did not have him!  What would I care for castles, diamonds, and carriages if he were not with me!  I am expecting him—­he may be here at any moment.  So tell me, father—­describe quickly how everything has happened.  I have not seen you for three days; I do not know what has occurred, for, strangely, nothing has reached the public.”

“The emperor enjoined the most inviolable silence upon us all,” said Schulmeister gloomily.  “The whole affair has been treated and concealed as the most profound secret.  The emperor does not wish to have anything known about it; no one must deem it possible that people have dared to seek to take his life, to attempt to capture him.  I never saw him in such a fury as when I first told him the plan of the conspirators.  His eyes flashed lightnings, he stamped his feet, clenched his little hands into fists, and stretched them threateningly toward the invisible conspirators.  He vowed to kill them all, to take vengeance on them all for the unprecedented crime.”

“And has he fulfilled the vow?”

“He has.  He has punished the conspirators, so far as lay in his power.  But some of them, for instance Baron von Moudenfels, do not belong to the number of his subjects, but are Austrians.  The emperor did not have the sentence which he pronounced upon his own subjects executed upon them; he could not at this time, for you know that negotiations for peace have been opened, and the treaty will be signed immediately.  So the emperor did not wish to constitute himself a judge of Austrian subjects; it is a delicate attention to the Austrian emperor, and the latter will know how to thank him for it and to punish the criminals with all the rigor of the law.  Therefore Baron von Moudenfels and Count von Kotte have merely been held as prisoners, and were compelled to witness the execution to-day.”

“What execution?” asked Leonore in horror.

“Colonel Lejeune, Captain de Guesniard, and two sous-lieutenants were shot this morning on the meadow at Schoenbrunn,"[E] said Schulmeister in a low tone.

Leonore shuddered, and a deathlike pallor overspread her face.  “And I delivered them to death!” she moaned.

“And if you had spared them, you would have delivered the Emperor Napoleon, the greatest man of the age, to death, to the most terrible torture of imprisonment!” cried her father, shrugging his shoulders.  “These men wished to commit a crime against their sovereign, their commander.  You have no reason to reproach yourself for having delivered the criminals to the law.”

“And Mariage?  What has become of Mariage?”