e secrecy about
everything concerning the boy to every one, even Barbara.

What Adrian had expected happened. The Emperor's command to take her
darling from her affected his wife most painfully. With eyes reddened by
weeping, and an aching heart, she awaited the day of departure.

On the evening before the journey she was sitting by the child's couch to
enjoy the sight of him as much as possible. Wholly absorbed in gazing at
his infantile grace and patrician beauty, she did not hear the door open,
and started in terror at the sound of footsteps close behind her.

Her husband had ushered the Emperor and Quijada, on whose arm he was
leaning, into the nursery without announcing his entrance. She
involuntarily pressed her finger on her lips to intimate that the child
must not be roused from its slumber; but the gesture was instantly
followed by the profound bow due to the sovereign, and then, with tears
in her eyes, she held the light so that it might fall upon the face of
the lovely child.

A flush tinged the livid features of the invalid, prematurely aged
monarch, and at a wave of his hand the foster-mother left him and his
companion alone with the little one. Charles gazed suspiciously around
the small, neat room.

Not until he had assured himself that he was alone did he look closely at
the son who lay with flushed cheeks on the white pillows of his little
bed in the sound slumber of childhood.

Rarely had he seen a more beautiful boy. How finely chiselled were these
childish features, how thick and wavy the curls that clustered around his
head! The golden lustre which shone from them had also brightened his
mother's hair. And the smile on the cherry lips of the slightly open
mouth. That, too, was familiar to him. The child had inherited it from
Barbara. Memories which had long since paled in his soul, oppressed by
suffering and disappointment, regained their vanished forms and colours,
and for the first time in many months a smile hovered upon his lips.

What an exquisite image of the Creator was this child! and he might call
it his own, and if, as he intended, it grew up an innocent, happy lad, it
would also become a genuine man, with a warm heart and simple, upright
nature, not a moving marble figure, inflated by pompous self-conceit,
incapable of any deep feeling, any untrammelled emotion, like his son
Philip. Then it might happen that from love, from a real living impulse
of the heart, he would fall upon his