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The Elector turned, and waddled out, leaving Königsmark to breathe freely again. The three days should suffice for the Princess also. It was very well. The Elector, too, thought that it was very well. He had given this troublesome fellow his dismissal, averted a scandal, and placed his daughter-in-law out of the reach of harm.

Lucien saw a great gulf fixed between him and this new world, and asked himself how he might cross over, for he meant to be one of these delicate, slim youths of Paris, these young patricians who bowed before women divinely dressed and divinely fair. For one kiss from one of these, Lucien was ready to be cut in pieces like Count Philip of Konigsmark.

Thereafter the halberts finished him off, and he was buried there and then, in lime, under the floor of the Hall of Knights, under the very spot where he had fallen, which was long to remain imbrued with his blood. Thus miserably perished the glittering Königsmark, a martyr to his own irrepressible romanticism. As for Sophia, better might it have been for her had she shared his fate that night.

He had learned from the party on the Neckar of the defection of Konigsmark and the Swedes, and that Conde and Turenne's united army did not exceed twenty thousand men, and, as he knew, that of Merci was at least equal to it in strength. His first question on entering the camp was as to the quarters of his own regiment, and he at once rode there.

"A glove her Highness lately dropped here," was the timid answer, innocently precipitating the very discovery which the woman had been too hastily dispatched to avert. The Elector flung the glove at her, and there was a creak of evil laughter from him. When she had departed' he turned again to Königsmark. "You fence skilfully," said he, sneering, "too skilfully for an honest man.

"Conceal yourself in the Rittersaal, and await his coming forth. But you had best go attended, for it is a very reckless rogue, and he has been known aforetime to practice murder." Whilst the Elector, acting upon this advice, was getting his men together, Königsmark was wasting precious moments in Sophia's antechamber, whilst Mademoiselle de Knesebeck apprised her Highness of his visit.

Was she not the deadly enemy of both? Had not the Princess whetted satire upon her, and had not Königsmark scorned the love she proffered him, and then unpardonably published it in a ribald story to excite the mirth of profligates? That evening the Countess purposefully sought her lover, the Elector. "Your son is away in Prussia," quoth she. "Who guards his honour in his absence?"

Now it so happened that Königsmark, through the kind offices of Sophia's maid-of-honour, Mademoiselle de Knesebeck, who was in the secret of their intentions, had sent the Princess a note that morning, briefly stating the urgency of departure, and begging her so to arrange that she could leave Herrenhausen with him on the morrow.

But the seventeenth century did not look for excessively nice scruples in a soldier of fortune; and so it condoned the lack of virtue in Count Philip Christof Königsmark for the sake of his personal beauty, his elegance, his ready wit, and his magnificent address.

A flush crept into his fair cheeks, there was a sudden kindling of the eyes that looked down into her own piteous ones. These sensitive, romantic natures are quickly stirred to passion, ever ready to yield to the adventure of it. "My princess," he said, "you may count upon your Königsmark while he has life."