Let the old noblewoman come now!

She was not long in doing so.  But how she looked!

The little gray curls done up in papers stood out queerly from her narrow head.  Her haggard cheeks were destitute of rouge and lividly pale.

Her black eyes glittered strangely from their deep sockets as if she were insane, and ragged pieces of her morning dress, which she had torn in a fit of helpless fury, hung down upon her breast.

The sight made Barbara shudder.  She suspected the truth.

During her absence a new message of evil had reached the marquise.

Unless ten thousand lire could be sent to her son at once, he would be condemned to the galleys, and his child would be abandoned to misery and disgrace.

While speaking, the wretched mother, with trembling hands, tore out a locket which she wore on a little chain around her neck.  It contained the angelic face, painted on ivory by an artist’s hand, of a fair-haired little girl.  The child bore her name, Barbara.  The singer knew this.  How often the affectionate grandmother had told her with sparkling eyes of her little “Babette”!

The father chained to the rowers’ bench among the most abominable ruffians, this loveliest of children perishing in hunger, misery, and shame—­what a terrible picture!  Barbara beheld it with tangible distinctness, and while the undignified old aristocrat, deprived of all self-control, sobbed and besought her to have compassion, the girl who had grown up amid poverty and care went back in memory to the days when, to earn money for a thin soup, a bit of dry bread, a small piece of cheap cow beef, or to protect herself from the importunity of an unpaid tradesman, she had washed laces with her own delicate hands and seen her nobly born, heroic father scratch crooked letters and scrawling ornaments upon common gray tin.

The same fate, nay, one a thousand times worse, awaited this wonderfully lovely patrician child, whose father was to wield the oars in the galleys if no one interceded for the unfortunate man.

What was life!

From the height of happiness it led her directly to such an abyss of the deepest woe.

What contrasts!

A day, an hour had transported her from bitter poverty and torturing yearning to the side of the highest and greatest of monarchs, but who could tell for how long—­how soon the fall into the gulf awaited her?

A shudder ran through her frame, and a deep pity for the sweet creature whose coloured likeness she held in her hand seized upon her.

She probably remembered her lover’s refusal, and that she only needed to allude to it to release herself from the wailing old woman, but an invisible power sealed her lips.  She was filled with an ardent desire to help, to avert this unutterable misery, to bring aid to this child, devoted to destruction.

To rise above everything petty, and with the imperial motto “More, farther,” before her eyes, to attain a lofty height from which to look down upon others and show her own generosity to them, had been the longing of her life.  She was still permitted to feel herself the object of the love of the mightiest sovereign on earth, and should she be denied performing, by her own power, an act of deliverance to which heart and mind urged her?