cut, nobly moulded, soldierly face revealed what moved him.

When, in a businesslike tone, he announced his sovereign's will, she
interrupted him with the remark that she knew all this, and had
determined to oppose her own resolve to his Majesty's wishes.

Don Luis calmly allowed her to finish, and then asked: "So you refuse to
take the veil? Yet I think, under existing circumstances, nothing could
become you better."

"Life in a convent," she answered firmly, "is distasteful to me, and I
will never submit to it. Besides, you were hardly commissioned to discuss
what does or does not become me."

"By no means," replied the Spaniard calmly; "yet you can attribute the
remark to my wish to serve you. During the remainder of our conference I
will silence it, and can therefore be brief."

"So much the better," was the curt response. "Well, then, so you insist
that you will neither keep the secret which you have the honour of
sharing with his Majesty, nor----"

"Stay!" she eagerly interrupted. "The Emperor Charles took care to make
the bond which united me to him cruelly hateful, and therefore I am not
at all anxious to inform the world how close it once was."

Here Don Luis bit his lips, and a frown contracted his brow. Yet he
controlled himself, and asked with barely perceptible excitement, "Then I
may inform his Majesty that you would be disposed to keep this secret?"

"Yes," she answered curtly.

"But, so far as the convent is concerned, you persist in your refusal?"

"Even a noble and kind man would never induce me to take the veil."

Now Quijada lost his composure, and with increasing indignation
exclaimed: "Of all the men on earth there is probably not one who cares
as little for the opinion of an arrogant woman wounded in her vanity. He
stands so far above your judgment that it is insulting him to undertake
his defence. In short, you will not go to the convent?"

"No, and again no!" she protested bitterly. "Besides, your promise ought
to bind you to still greater brevity. But it seems to please your noble
nature to insult a defenceless, ill-treated woman. True, perhaps it is
done on behalf of the mighty man who stands so far above me."

"How far, you will yet learn to your harm," replied Don Luis, once more
master of himself. "As for the child, you still seem determined to
withhold it from the man who will recognise it as his solely on this
condition?"

Barbara thought it time to drop the restraint maint