Barbara shudder. She suspected the truth.

During her absence a new message of evil had reached the marquise.

Unless ten thousand lire could be sent to her son at once, he would be
condemned to the galleys, and his child would be abandoned to misery and
disgrace.

While speaking, the wretched mother, with trembling hands, tore out a
locket which she wore on a little chain around her neck. It contained
the angelic face, painted on ivory by an artist's hand, of a fair-haired
little girl. The child bore her name, Barbara. The singer knew this. How
often the affectionate grandmother had told her with sparkling eyes of
her little "Babette"!

The father chained to the rowers' bench among the most abominable
ruffians, this loveliest of children perishing in hunger, misery,
and shame--what a terrible picture! Barbara beheld it with tangible
distinctness, and while the undignified old aristocrat, deprived of all
self-control, sobbed and besought her to have compassion, the girl who
had grown up amid poverty and care went back in memory to the days when,
to earn money for a thin soup, a bit of dry bread, a small piece of
cheap cow beef, or to protect herself from the importunity of an unpaid
tradesman, she had washed laces with her own delicate hands and seen
her nobly born, heroic father scratch crooked letters and scrawling
ornaments upon common gray tin.

The same fate, nay, one a thousand times worse, awaited this wonderfully
lovely patrician child, whose father was to wield the oars in the
galleys if no one interceded for the unfortunate man.

What was life!

From the height of happiness it led her directly to such an abyss of the
deepest woe.

What contrasts!

A day, an hour had transported her from bitter poverty and torturing
yearning to the side of the highest and greatest of monarchs, but who
could tell for how long--how soon the fall into the gulf awaited her?

A shudder ran through her frame, and a deep pity for the sweet creature
whose coloured likeness she held in her hand seized upon her.

She probably remembered her lover's refusal, and that she only needed
to allude to it to release herself from the wailing old woman, but an
invisible power sealed her lips. She was filled with an ardent desire
to help, to avert this unutterable misery, to bring aid to this child,
devoted to destruction.

To rise above everything petty, and with the imperial motto "More,
farther," before her eyes, to attain a lofty