Barbara, panting for breath, listened to his report without interrupting him; but as the physician thought he perceived in the varying expression of her features and the wandering glance with which she listened tokens that she did not fully understand what the Emperor required of her, he summed up his communications once more.

“His Majesty,” he concluded, “was ready to recognise as his own the young life to be expected, if she would keep the secret, and decide to commit it to his sole charge from its arrival in the world; but, on the other hand, he would refuse this to her and to the child if she did not agree to impose upon herself sacrifice and silence.”

At this brief, plain statement Barbara had pressed her hands upon her temples and stretched her head far forward toward the physician.  Now she lowered her right hand, and with the question, “So this is what I must understand?” impetuously struck herself a blow on the forehead.

The patient man again raised his voice to make the expression of the monarch’s will still plainer, but she interrupted him after the first few words with the exclamation:  “You can spare yourself this trouble, for the meaning of the man whose message you bear is certainly evident enough.  What my poor intellect fails to comprehend is only—­do you hear?—­is only where the faithless traitor gains the courage to make me so unprecedented a demand.  Hitherto I was only not wicked enough to know that there—­there was such an abyss of abominable hard-heartedness, such fiendish baseness, such——­”

Here an uncontrollable fit of coughing interrupted her, but Dr. Mathys would have stopped her in any case; it was unendurable to him to listen longer while the great man who was the Emperor, and whom he also honoured as a man, was reviled with such savage recklessness.

As in so many instances, Charles’s penetration had been superior to his; for he had not failed to notice to what tremendous extremes this girl’s hasty temper could carry her.  What burning, almost evil passion had flamed in her eyes while uttering these insults!  How perfectly right his Majesty was to withdraw from all association with a woman of so irresponsible a nature!

He repressed with difficulty the indignation which had overpowered him until her coughing ceased, then, in a tone of stern reproof, he declared that he could not and ought not to listen to such words.  She whom the Emperor Charles had honoured with his love would perhaps in the future learn to recognise his decision as wise, though it might offend her now.  When she had conquered the boundless impetuosity which so ill beseemed her, she herself would probably perceive how immeasurably deep and wide was the gulf which separated her from the sacred person of the man who, next to God, was the highest power on earth.  Not only justice but duty would command the head of the most illustrious family in the world to claim the sole charge of his child, that it might be possible to train it unimpeded to the lofty position of the father, instead of the humble one of the mother.