'Our lady is a true daughter of the Holy Church,' he said; 'all the lands and all the wealth she has will come to the Church. You will see, should we outlive her--which the saints send we may not do--that the burg will be bequeathed by her to form a convent of Ursulines. It is the order she most loves.'
She overheard him say so once when she sat in her boat beneath the willows drifting by under the island, and she sighed impatiently.
'No, I shall not do that,' she thought. 'The religious foundations did a great work in their time, but that time is over. They can no more resist the pressure of the change of thought and habit than I can set sail like S. Ursula with eleven thousand virgins. Hohenszalras shall go to the Crown; they will do what seems best with it. But I may live fifty years and more.'
A certain sadness came over her as she thought so; a long life, a lonely life, appalled her, even though it was cradled in all luxury and strengthened with all power.
'If only my Bela were living!' she said, half aloud; and the water grew dim to her sight as it flowed away green and sparkling into the deep long shadows of its pine-clothed shores, shadows, stretching darkly across its western side, whilst the eastern extremity was still warm in the afternoon light.
The great pile of Hohenszalras seemed to tower up into the very clouds; the evening sun, not yet sunk behind the Venediger range, shone ruddily on all its towers and its gothic spires, and the grim sculptures and the glistening metal, with which it was so lavishly ornamented, were illumined till it looked like some colossal and enchanted citadel, where soon the magic ivory horn of Childe Boland might sound and wake the spell-bound warders.
But her regret was not only for her brother.
In the October of that year her solitude was broken; her Sovereign signified her desire to see Hohenszalras again. They were about to visit Salzburg, and expressed their desire to pass three days in the Iselthal. There was nothing to be done but to express gratitude for the honour and make the necessary preparations. The von Szalras had been always loyal allies rather than subjects, and their devotion to the Habsburg house had been proved in many ways and with constancy. She felt that she would rather have to collect and equip a regiment of horse, as her fathers had done, than fill her home with the _tapage_ inevitable to an Imperial reception, but she was not insensible to the friendship that dictated this mark of honour.