She
would have died without it; she lived and struggled with her grief only
for his sake.

This was a wretched, joyless existence--a never-ending martyrdom, a
never-ceasing contest. Amelia stood alone and unloved in her family,
feared and avoided by all the merry, thoughtless, pleasure seeking
circle. In her sad presence they shuddered involuntarily and felt
chilled, as by a blast from the grave. She was an object of distrust and
weariness to her companions and servants, an object of love and frank
affection to no one.

Mademoiselle Ernestine von Haak had alone remained true to her; but she
had married, and gone far away with her husband. Princess Amelia was
now alone; there was no one to whom she could express her sorrow and her
fears; no one who understood her suppressed agony, or who spoke one word
of consolation or sympathy to her broken heart.

She was alone in the world, and the consciousness of this steeled her
strength, and made an impenetrable shield for her wearied soul. She gave
herself up entirety to her thoughts and dreams. She lived a strange,
enchanted, double life and twofold existence. Outwardly, she was
old, crushed, ill; her interior life was young, fresh, glowing, and
energetic, endowed with unshaken power, and tempered in the fire of
her great grief. Amelia lay upon the divan and looked dreamily toward
heaven. A strange and unaccountable presentiment was upon her; she
trembled with mysterious forebodings. She had always felt thus when any
new misfortunes were about to befall Trenck. It seemed as if her soul
was bound to his, and by means of an electric current she felt the blow
in the same moment that it fell upon him.

The princess believed in these presentiments. She had faith in dreams
and prophecies, as do all those unhappy beings to whom fate has
denied real happiness, and who seek wildly in fantastic visions for
compensation. She loved, therefore, to look into the future through
fortune-tellers and dark oracles, and thus prepare herself for the sad
events which lay before her. The day before, the renowned astrologer
Pfannenstein had warned her of approaching peril; he declared that a
cloud of tears was in the act of bursting upon her! Princess Amelia
believed in his words, and waited with a bold, resolved spirit for the
breaking of the cloud, whose gray veil she already felt to be round
about her.

These sad thoughts were interrupted by a light knock upon the door,
and her maid entered