"You love me, then, love me truly?" asked Ludovicka, tenderly clinging to him. "I love you with wrath and pain, love you with rapture and delight, love you in spite of the whole world! I will know nothing, consider nothing, hear nothing of the folly of the wise, of the irrationality of the rational, of the stupidity of the sage. I will know nothing and hear nothing, but that I love you! Just as you are, so cruel and so lovely, so coquettish and so innocent, so passionate and yet so cold. Oh, you are an enchantress, who has changed my whole being and taken possession of all my thoughts and all my feelings. Formerly I loved my parents, feared my father, respected my friend and early teacher, the faithful Leuchtmar, listened to his counsels, followed his advice. But now all that is past--all is swallowed up. I think only of you, only know you, only hear you." "And yet a day will come when I shall call upon you in vain, a day when you shall no longer hear my voice." "It will be the day of my death." "No; the day when you leave this place. The day on which you return to your native land to become there a reigning lord, and leave the poor humbled Princess Ludovicka behind here deserted and alone." "But you? Will you not go with me?" he asked, in amazement. "Will not my country be yours? And if I am a reigning lord, will you not stand as sovereign lady by my side?" "I?" asked she, bewildered. "How do you mean? I do not understand you." "I mean," he whispered softly, while he clasped her closely to himself--"I mean that you shall accompany me as my wife." "But!" cried she, smiling, and with an expression of radiant joy--"but you have never said that I should be your wife." "Have I not told you that I love you? Have I not been repeating to you for a year that I love you? And does it not naturally follow that you and you alone are to be my wife?" "But they will not suffer it, Frederick!" cried she, with an expression of pain. "No, they will never suffer you to make me your wife." "Who will not suffer it, Ludovicka?" "Your parents will not suffer it, and the great Lord von Schwarzenberg, who rules your father, as my mother has told me, and Herr von Leuchtmar, who rules you and--" "Nobody rules me," interrupted he indignantly, and a flush of anger or shame suffused his face. "No, nobody rules me, and I shall never be subject to any other will than my own." "So you say now, Frederick, while you look into my eyes, while you are at my side. But to-morrow, when I am no longer by, when your tutor shall have proved with his cold, matter-of-fact arguments that the poor Princess Ludovicka is no fit match for the Electoral Prince of Brandenburg--to-morrow, when your tutor will chide his beloved pupil for ever having allowed so foolish a love to enter his heart, then--" "I am a pupil no longer," interrupted he with glowing cheek. "I am seventeen years old, and no tutor has any more power over me."