So time passed with the speed of the wind.  The candles in the candelabrum were already half burned down when Fran Dubois at last urged going to rest.

Barbara felt that she was fortunate to have found so kind and sensible a companion and, while the Rhinelander was helping her undress, she begged her in future to call her by her Christian name “Gertrud,” or, as people liked to address her, “Frau Traut.”

CHAPTER VIII.

When Barbara rose from her couch the next morning it was no longer early in the day.  She had slept soundly and dreamlessly for several hours, then she had been kept awake by the same thoughts which had pressed upon her so constantly of late.

She would defy Charles’s cruel demand.  The infuriating compulsion inflicted upon her could only strengthen her resolve.  If she was dragged to a convent by force, she would refuse, at the ceremony of profession, to become a nun.

She thought of a pilgrimage to induce Heaven to restore the lost melody of her voice.  But meanwhile the longing to see the Emperor Charles’s face once more again and again overpowered her.  On the other hand, the desire to speak to him and upbraid him to his face for the wrong he had done her was soon silenced; it could only spoil his memory of her if he should hear the discordant tones which inflicted pain on her own ear.

Another train of thoughts had also kept her awake.  How was her father faring?  Had he learned what she feared to confess to him?  What had befallen him, and what had the recruiting officer to tell of his fate?

She was to know soon enough, for she had scarcely risen from breakfast when a ducal servant announced Sir Pyramus.

Barbara with anxious heart awaited his entrance, and as she stood there, her cheeks slightly flushed and her large, questioning eyes fixed upon the door, she seemed to Frau Traut, in spite of her short hair and the loss of the rounded oval of her face, so marvellously beautiful that she perfectly understood how she had succeeded in kindling so fierce a flame in the Emperor’s heart, difficult as it was to fire.

Frau Traut did not venture to determine what made the blood mount into Pyramus’s cheeks when Barbara at his entrance held out her slender white hand, for she had left the room immediately after his arrival.  But she did not need to remain absent long; the interview ended much sooner than she expected.

This young officer was certainly a man of splendid physique, with handsome, manly features, yet she thought she perceived in his manner an air of constraint which repelled her and, in fact, this gigantic soldier was conscious that if, for a single moment, he relinquished the control he imposed upon himself his foolish heart would play him a trick.