ake, to strike like ice
into her soul. An instant more and he would have known that she was a
Princess of the Blood, and through his whole life she could have gone
on worshiping him because he had been ready to break down all barriers
for her love, before he guessed there need be none to break. Now her
warm impulse of gratitude was frozen by the biting blast of
disillusionment; but still there was hope left. It might be that she
misunderstood him. She would not judge him yet.

"The empire of your heart," she echoed. "If that were mine I should be
richer than with all the treasures of the earth. If you were Leo, the
chamois hunter, I would love you as I love you now, because in
yourself you are the one man for me; and I'd go with you to the end of
the world, as your wife. But you're not the chamois hunter; you are
the man I love, yet you are the Emperor. Being the Emperor, had you
talked of a hopeless love and a promise not to forget, having nothing
else to give me, because of your high destiny and my humbler one, I
could still have been happy. Yet you speak of more than that. You
speak of something I can't understand. It seems to me that what a
Royal man offers the woman he loves should be all or nothing."

"I do offer you all," said Leopold. "All myself, my life, the heart
and soul of me--all that's my own to give. The rest--belongs to
Rhaetia."

"Then what do you mean by--"

"Don't you understand, my sweet, that I've asked you to be my wife?
What can a man ask more of a woman?"

"Your wife--but not the Empress. How can the two be apart?"

He tried to take her once more in his arms, but when he saw that she
would not have it so, he held his love in check, and waited. He was
sure that he would not need to wait long, for not only had he laid his
love at her feet, but had pledged himself to a tremendous sacrifice on
love's altar.

The step which in a moment of passion he had now resolved to take
would create dissension among his people, alienate one who had been
his second father, rouse England, America and Germany to anger,
because of the Princess whose name rumor had already coupled with his,
and raise in every direction a storm of disapproval. When this girl
whom he loved realized the immensity of the concession he was making
because of his reverent love for her, she would give her life to him,
now and forever.

Tenderly he took her hand and lifted it to his lips; then, when
she did not draw it away (because