exclaiming: "It is not you who are offended, but I, the sovereign whom
you say you love. Day before yesterday I forbade you to go to the
musician in Red Cock Street, yet you were with him to-day. I asked you
just now whether you had obeyed me and, with smiling lips, you assented."

Barbara was already prepared with an answer in harmony with the sharpness
of the attack, yet her lover's reproof was well founded.

When he had left the room shortly before he must have been informed that,
in defiance of his explicit command, she had gone to the knight's house
that morning.

But no one had ever charged her with lack of courage. Why had she not
dared to confess the fault which, from a good and certainly pardonable
impulse, she had committed?

Was she not free, or when had she placed herself under obligation to
render blind obedience to her lover?

But the falsehood!

How severely she must perhaps atone for it this time!

Yet the esteem, the love of the man to whom her heart clung, whom she
worshipped with all the fervour of her passionate soul, might be at
stake, and when he now seized his hat to withdraw she barred his way.

Sobbing aloud, she threw herself at his feet, confessed that she was
guilty, and remorsefully admitted that fear of his resentment, which
seemed to her more terrible than death, had induced her to deny what she
had done. She could hate herself for it. Nothing could palliate the
departure from the path of truth, but her disobedience might perhaps
appear to him in a milder light if he learned what had induced her to
commit it.

Charles, still in an angry, imperious tone, ordered her to rise. She
silently obeyed, and when he threw himself on the divan she timidly sat
down by his side, turning toward him her troubled face, which for the
first time he saw wet with tears.

Yet a hopeful smile brightened her moist eyes, for she felt that, since
he permitted her to remain at his side, all might yet be well.

Then she timidly took his hand and, as he permitted it, she held it
firmly while she explained what ties had bound her to Wolf from
childhood.

She represented herself as the sisterly counsellor of the friend who had
grown up in the same house with her. Music and the Catholic religion, in
the midst of a city which had fallen into the Protestant heresy, had been
the bond between them. After his return home he had probably been unable
to help falling in love with her, but, so truly as she hoped fo