“And as I shall confess,” she cried impetuously, “so long as a single breath stirs this bosom; for I love you, John—­love you with all the strength of this poor, sorely tortured soul.  But, child, child!  What you ask of me—­It comes so unexpectedly—­you have no suspicion how deeply it pierces into the very heart of my life.  I must leave the country which has become my home, the city where prejudice and enmity greeted me, and where I have now obtained the position that befits me.  A venerable sick man is in my house, longing for the return of the nurse who left him for your sake.  My poor—­The rest that I must cast aside and abandon is more than I can enumerate now.  Nor could I, this request bewilders me so —­Give rue a little time to collect my thoughts, for you see—­But if you look at me so, John, I can—­Yet no!—­It certainly is not necessary that I should say yes or no at once.  I must first learn whether you—­whether the sacrifice I made for your glory and grandeur—­it was in Landshut, you know—­whether it was really so useless, whether you are in reality as unhappy as you, the fame-crowned, beloved, and lauded child of an Emperor, would have me believe, or whether—­Forgive me, John, but before I make this terribly difficult decision I must—­yes, I must see clearly.  As surely as your hero soul harbours no falsity, it would be unworthy of you to show your mother a distorted image of your inner life; you must confess whether you—­”

“Whether,” Don John, with a smile of sorrowful bitterness, here interrupted the deeply troubled woman—­“whether, in order to soften your heart, I am not painting in blacker colours than reality requires.  Oh, how little you know me yet!  I would rather this tongue should wither than that I should unchivalrously permit it to deviate one straw’s breadth from the truth in order to attain a selfish purpose.  No, mother!  My description of the grief which often overpowers this soul was far too lukewarm.  If your first sacrifice was intended to make me a happy man, its effect was no stronger than the light of the candle which is burned amid the radiance of the noonday sun.  Perhaps I should have been happier had I been allowed to grow up in modest circumstances under your tender care; for then my course would have been long and steep, and I should have been forced to climb many steps to reach the point where barriers are fixed to ambition.  But as it is, I began at the place which many of the best men regard as the highest goal.  The great man whom you loved understood life better than you.  Had I obeyed his wish, and in the stillness of the cloister striven for blessings which do not belong to this world, this miserable existence would have seemed less unendurable to me, then doubtless a much wider space would have separated me from despair; for I am so unhappy, mother, that I envy the poor peasant who in the sweat of his brow gathers the harvest which his sterile fields produce; for years I have been