"The son of Ripperda," replied Louis, "could not feel otherwise towards the friend of his father. But I would devote myself to watch this couch, for the Sieur Ignatius's own sake." Again he felt his hand pressed by the wounded man; and the smile, which was once so beautiful, flitted over his shrouded countenance like a departing spirit. Louis turned icy cold. He had never seen any one on a death-bed; and that spectacle, which he believed was now before him, shivered him to the soul. "Louis," said the Sieur, after a pause, "I have not summoned you hither, to wait upon the tedious hours of my recovery, but to perform my part in the place, where jealousy of my success has brought me to this. You must go to the Imperial palace; I am expected there in the course of an hour; for none there yet know of this assassination. You must see the Empress, and acquaint her with what has happened. With difficulty I have written these few hardly legible lines, to assure her she may trust you with any confidential paper or message to me; and she too well knows my writing, to doubt their authenticity. My surgeons say little to encourage hope, but tell Her Majesty, I feel a life in my heart, that her enemies and mine have not been able to reach!" Ignatius spoke this at intervals, checked at each sentence by internal spasms from his most dangerous wound. But he shewed a vehemence at the close, which his pupil had never before witnessed in his tempered discourse. More than his usual caution seemed taken from his lips, and as Louis apprehended the approach of delirium, he felt the hand which still clasped his, flash at once into a scorching heat. The agitated speaker gasped for breath, but after a momentary pause he began again, and with rapid utterance went through a train of directions, to guide his pupil in his conference with the Empress. In the midst of the most energetic part of his discourse, his lip became convulsed, he suddenly stopped, and dropping the hand he held, seemed as if seized at once by the grasp of death. Louis sprang forward, to give air to the enveloped face, but the moment Ignatius felt the attempt to withdraw his cowl, he arrested the hand that touched it, and said in a stifled voice: "do not be alarmed, I am not dying, but in pain. The villains struck well through my side, but not quite home!--Go," continued he, "you will find Martini in the anti-chamber. He has my orders to attend you to the palace. You will then be conducted to the Altheim apartments; shew that card to the page at the door, (it is written by the Empress's own hand, to admit the possessor,) and he will immediately obey its command. In those apartments you will see the Imperial Elizabeth."