ve back to me my happiness, my home, my family.
For you are all that to me, and without you the world is a desert."

"Without you the world is a wilderness, Rebecca. Swear to me that you love
me!"

"I swear to you, by the God of my fathers, that I love you!"

"And would you love me if the whole world despised me?"

"What matters the world to me? Would I still love you? I would love you
more fervently yet if all the world despised you, for then you would be
like me. They despise me too, and turn away contemptuously from me, and
yet I have done nothing bad."

"Would you love me, Rebecca, even if I had committed a crime?"

"What do men call crime? Do they not say that you commit a crime in loving
me? Would they not say, too, that the priest who blessed our union was a
criminal? Be whatever you may, do what you will, I shall love you still.
Your soul is my soul, and my heart is your heart. Release me, Gabriel,
release me!"

"I will release you, Rebecca; in four days you shall be free, and we shall
journey away from here, and return to Italy, never to leave it again."

"To Italy!" rejoiced she--"to my home! Oh, my Gabriel, I shall not merely
love you, I shall worship you--you will be to me the Saviour, the Messiah,
in whom my people have hoped so long! I--"

"Now that is enough," cried Count Schwarzenberg, who had been silent
hitherto, because he felt well how much Rebecca's words forwarded his own
plans. "Now that is enough of refractoriness! Come, Gabriel Nietzel, and
you, Rebecca, step back, or I shall have your child taken away, and you
shall never see it again!"

"Go, Rebecca, go!" cried Gabriel Nietzel cheerfully. "You remain with me,
even if you go, and I shall still see and speak to you when I am far from
you. Four days only, and then we shall be reunited!"

"I am going, Gabriel! I shall spend all these four days praying for you--to
your and my God!"

"Sir Count!" cried Nietzel in cheerful tones--"Sir Count, let us now
return to your cabinet. I have something important to communicate to you."

He cast not another look up at the curtain; he had no longer any sense of
pain in her disappearance, but this was his one absorbing thought, that in
four days he would again embrace his Rebecca, and that it lay in the power
of his own hands to deserve her. With firm steps he followed the count,
who now again led him out of the hall and into his cabinet.

"Well, speak, Master Gabriel!" cried the count; "what hav