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.