ore
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.

Feodor understood the hidden meaning of this apparently gracious and
loving letter; he underst