"I am sorry for you," she said. "Even in my own misery I am not so blinded but that I can see that your burden of sorrow is a heavy one--more than you can bear. Yet methinks, were I a man, I would not thus give way to it. I am but a woman, but my greatest wish--since nothing else is left me--is that I may see Coryon once more--stand face to face with him--and show him that all his calculated cruelty and subtle ingenuity of torture have not subdued my spirit, nor the scorn that a heart conscious of having done no wrong can feel for such as he. I would give him back look for look, hate for hate, as I have before to-day; and make his wicked eyes quail before mine with the consciousness that the spirit of one he has unjustly oppressed can show itself greater than his own. But with _you_--he will but laugh at you--for I feel, somehow, you will be taken from here to meet him. I suspect he has sent you here first to crush your spirit with the sight of the horrors that are perpetrated here. He--have you ever seen him?" "No," Leonard answered, staring at her in amazement. "Ah! then you know not what he is like. I tell you," the strange woman went on, her eyes lighting up with unexpected fire, "he is a man whose mere glance strikes terror into the souls of ordinary men. There is that about him that makes you shrink as from some unearthly incarnation of all the powers of evil; and in that he delights, yea, more, even, than in torturing his victims." Here she broke off abruptly; then resumed, in a different manner. "I have been wondering whether you are he who was to have wedded the princess?" "Alas! yes. You have divined aright," Leonard answered sadly. "Then," said the woman, with increasing warmth, that gained as she went on an energy that was almost fierceness, "then, the greater the reason you should throw off this weakness and gird up your strength to meet the haughty tyrant and show him that your spirit is equal to his own. In all his ill-spent time upon this earth--and they say it has been a very long one--it is his boast and his pride that scarce any can meet his glance without quailing under it. Think! Think how he will triumph over you--how he will point the finger of scorn--turn the look of cold contempt upon the one who aspired to be the future king of this country--and _that_ means to stand on an equality with himself--and yet, as he will declare, is but a weak, puling, or ordinary mortal. Ah! would I were in your place! You can but die. But I would make him feel that I had a heart, a spirit, more dauntless, more unconquerable than his own. Ay! I would die knowing that for many and many and many a year to come, the remembrance that he had met _one_ spirit he could not intimidate or master would be to him an instrument of defeat and shame, eating into his proud heart, even as the suffering he has caused to me has gnawed into my own."