"You must manage the preliminaries to-night with Sinzendorf," said the Sieur, "But to-morrow, whether it be to return on my litter or in my hearse, I will see the Empress myself.--When the triumphal arch is ready," added he, with one of those smiles, which visited his dark countenance like the shooting of a star; "the wounded hero is unworthy its honours, that will not venture his life to pass through!" Louis bowed his assent to the Sieur's observation, with a smile bright as his own; and, soon after, the College bell reminded him that the time of his audience with the Chancellor drew near. On his rising to obey its summons, Ignatius looked up from some letters he was writing, and told him to rejoin him in that chamber the next morning by day-break. "To-morrow," added he, "will epitomise the history of Europe for many a future year; and be the deciding epoch of your destiny." The usual time of Louis's visit to the Chancellor Sinzendorf was an hour before midnight; immediately after His Excellency had left the card-table of the Emperor. And, as from the intricacy of his new communications with the minister, Louis's present conference was much longer than ordinary, it was an hour beyond midnight before he left the Chancellor's apartments. Hurrying along, to get out of the interior galleries of the palace at so unseasonable an hour, at an abrupt turning into the large lighted rotunda where most of the passages terminated, he ran violently against a person wrapped in a splendid pelisse. He looked up, to apologize, and beheld Duke Wharton. Louis sprang from the side of the Duke, as if struck back by electricity: but Wharton grasped his arm. With an averted face, and a heart yearning to embrace the friend, whose presence, and whose touch, obliterated all remembrance of resentment, Louis made another ineffectual struggle to break away; but the Duke, in a gaily affectionate voice, exclaimed,--"I have clutched you, Chevalier Phaffenberg! and if you were Chevalier Proteus himself, you should not elude these ten fingers!" As he spoke, he threw his other arm round the waist of his friend, and seized his opposite arm also. "Release me, Duke Wharton!" cried Louis, fully remembering his double promise to Ignatius and to the Empress, and striving to recall the circumstances at the Electress's, which had excited his indignation:--"This is a liberty----" "That is nothing between friends," interrupted the Duke, in the same happy tone; "but if we are enemies, I am too old a soldier to release the prisoner, who may only want to cut my throat!" "Duke Wharton!" returned Louis, fearful of being subdued by accents so eloquent of former confidence; "when you see I would avoid you, this detention is at least ungenerous. By the friendship you claim, and you have; no longer withhold me! one day I will thank you for your forbearance."