"Villanow!" repeated the countess, in a tone of tender surprise;
"surely that was the seat of the celebrated Palatine of Masovia! You
have discovered yourself, Constantine! I am much mistaken if you be
not his grandson, the young, yet far-famed, Thaddeus Sobieski?"
Thaddeus had allowed the remembrances pressing on his mind to draw
him into a speech which had disclosed to the quick apprehension of
the countess what his still too sensitive pride would forever have
concealed.
"I have indeed betrayed my secret," cried he, incapable of denying
it; "but, dear lady Tinemouth, as you value my feelings, never let it
escape your lips. Having long considered you as my best friend, and
loved you as a parent, I forgot, in the recollection of my beloved
mother, that I had withheld any of my history from you."
"Mysterious Providence!" exclaimed her ladyship, after a pause, in
which ten thousand admiring and pitying reflections thronged on her
mind: "is it possible? Can it be the Count Sobieski, that brave and
illustrious youth of whom every foreigner spoke with wonder? Can it
be him that I behold in the unknown, unfriended Constantine?"
"Even so," returned Thaddeus, pressing her hand. "My country is no
more. I am now forgotten by the world, as I have been by fortune. I
have nothing to do on the earth but to fulfil the few duties which a
filial friendship has enjoined, and then it will be a matter of
indifference to me how soon I am laid in its bosom.
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