Page:Legends of Rubezahl, and Other Tales (1845).djvu/267

 as she has done? Was there any necessity for her thus to accompany a condition impossible for me to fulfil, with the sting of her adder’s tongue? Have I deserved such treatment at her hands?”

Full of mortification and despair, Ulric quitted the Court without taking leave of any one, and the courtiers inferred from his abrupt disparition that he was meditating some signal vengeance on the arrogant Lucretia. But little cared she about the matter; she waited quietly, like a spider in the centre of its web, for some new victim to be entangled in her snares. Count Rupert, less sentimental than Ulric, extricated himself from the trammels of the coquette without difficulty, and without having, like his rival, deposited his whole fortune in her jewel-case, a circumstance which in no degree troubled Lucretia, who, to do her justice, was not at all avaricious. Indeed, ’twould have been strange had this been her vice, possessed as she was of plenty of golden eggs, and in the bloom of beauty. Not Ulric’s presents, but Ulric himself, sacrificed on the altar of her vanity, had afforded her gratification, and she was, consequently, very hurt and indignant at the reproaches daily made her by the Empress, and re-echoed by the murmuring of the whole Court, which charged her with having been the ruin of Ulric in a pecuniary point of view. For it to be said that she had broken