nched at his information
that, owing to the pressure of duties which the commencement of the war
imposed upon him, his Majesty would be unable to visit her here. But
when, to sweeten the bitter potion, he had added that when her throat
was well again, and her voice had regained its former melody, the
monarch would once more gladly listen to her, he was startled; for,
instead of answering, she merely shrugged her shoulders contemptuously,
while her face grew corpselike in its pallor. He would have been
best pleased to end his report here, but she could not be spared the
suffering to which she was doomed, and pity demanded that the torture
should be ended as quickly as possible. So, to raise her courage,
he began with the Emperor's congratulations, and while her eyes were
sparkling brightly and her pale cheeks were crimsoned by a fleeting
flush, he went on, as considerately as he could, to inform her of the
Emperor's resolution, not neglecting while he did so to place it in a
milder light by many a palliating remark.

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 enoug