The negress at Martinique had said to her, “You will be more than a queen.”  But now, Josephine had visited the new fortune-teller, Madame Villeneuve, in Paris, and she had said to her, “You will wear a crown, but only for a short time.”

Only for a short time!  Josephine was too young, too happy, and too healthful, to think of her own early death.  It must, then, be something else that threatened her—­a separation, perhaps.  She had no children, yet Bonaparte so earnestly desired to have a son, and his brothers repeated to him daily that this was for him a political necessity.

Thus Josephine trembled for her future; she stretched out her hands for help, and in the selfishness of her trouble asked her daughter to give up her own dreams of happiness, in order to secure the real happiness of her mother.

Yet Hortense was in love; her young heart throbbed painfully at the thought of not only relinquishing her own love, but of marrying an unloved man, whom she had never even thought of, and had scarcely noticed.  She deemed it impossible that she could be asked to sacrifice her own beautiful and blessed happiness, to a cold-blooded calculation, an artificial family intrigue; and so, with all the enthusiasm of a first love, she swore rather to perish than to forego her lover.

“But Duroc has no fortune and no future to offer you,” said Josephine.  “What he is, he is only through the friendship of Bonaparte.  He has no estate, no importance, no celebrity.  Were Bonaparte to abandon him he would fall back into nothingness and obscurity again.”

Hortense replied, smiling through her tears:  “I love him, and have no other ambition than to be his wife.”

“But he?  Do you think that he too has no other ambition than to become your husband?  Do you think that he loves you for your own sake alone?”

“I know it,” said the young girl, with beaming eyes; “Duroc has told me that he loved me, and me only.  He has sworn eternal fidelity and love to me.  Both of us ask for nothing more than to belong to each other.”

Josephine shrugged her shoulders almost compassionately.

“Suppose,” she rejoined, “that I were to affirm that Duroc is willing to marry you, only because he is ambitious, and thinks that Bonaparte would then advance him the more rapidly?”

“It is a slander—­it is impossible!” exclaimed Hortense, glowing with honest indignation; “Duroc loves me, and his noble soul is far from all selfish calculation.”

“And if I were to prove the contrary to you?” asked Josephine, irritated by her daughter’s resistance, and made cruel by her alarm for her own fortunes.

Hortense turned pale, and her face, which had been so animated, so beautiful, a moment before, blanched as though the icy chill of death had passed over it.

“If you can prove to me,” she said, in a hollow tone, “that Duroc loves me only through ambitious motives, I am ready to give him up, and marry whom you will.”