“Would you love me, Rebecca, even if I had committed a crime?”

“What do men call crime?  Do they not say that you commit a crime in loving me?  Would they not say, too, that the priest who blessed our union was a criminal?  Be whatever you may, do what you will, I shall love you still.  Your soul is my soul, and my heart is your heart.  Release me, Gabriel, release me!”

“I will release you, Rebecca; in four days you shall be free, and we shall journey away from here, and return to Italy, never to leave it again.”

“To Italy!” rejoiced she—­“to my home!  Oh, my Gabriel, I shall not merely love you, I shall worship you—­you will be to me the Saviour, the Messiah, in whom my people have hoped so long!  I—­”

“Now that is enough,” cried Count Schwarzenberg, who had been silent hitherto, because he felt well how much Rebecca’s words forwarded his own plans.  “Now that is enough of refractoriness!  Come, Gabriel Nietzel, and you, Rebecca, step back, or I shall have your child taken away, and you shall never see it again!”

“Go, Rebecca, go!” cried Gabriel Nietzel cheerfully.  “You remain with me, even if you go, and I shall still see and speak to you when I am far from you.  Four days only, and then we shall be reunited!”

“I am going, Gabriel!  I shall spend all these four days praying for you—­to your and my God!”

“Sir Count!” cried Nietzel in cheerful tones—­“Sir Count, let us now return to your cabinet.  I have something important to communicate to you.”

He cast not another look up at the curtain; he had no longer any sense of pain in her disappearance, but this was his one absorbing thought, that in four days he would again embrace his Rebecca, and that it lay in the power of his own hands to deserve her.  With firm steps he followed the count, who now again led him out of the hall and into his cabinet.

“Well, speak, Master Gabriel!” cried the count; “what have you to say to me?”

Nietzel drew a paper from his breast pocket, and handed it to the count.  “See, your excellency, here is the sketch of the painting I am to make for you.”

“Truly, a precious sketch,” said Schwarzenberg, examining the paper attentively.  “That looks like a Holy Supper.”

“It is no Holy Supper, but a very unholy dinner.”

“In the middle of the table I see sitting a man and a youth.  The man wears a crown upon his head and the youth wears a princely coronet.”

“It is the Elector and the Electoral Prince,” explained Gabriel Nietzel.

“Yes, indeed, the portraits are theirs.  And beside them sits the Electress, and beside her I see myself, and quite gorgeously have you dressed me, with a princely ermined mantle about my shoulders and a prince’s diadem upon my brow.  But what is that which I hold in my hand and offer to the Electress?”

“It is a lachrymatory, your excellency.”

“And yet the Electress smiles, Sir Painter.”