She let the storm pass, waiting with bowed head; and presently, with an effort to command himself, he put a question to her:
“What is your unfitness? Speak!”
She looked up, then, the tears brimming in her eyes.
“I do not think I was born for a throne,” she said—so movingly, that his heart should have been touched a little. “Its grandeur frightens me.”
He waved that absurdity aside with hauteur. To scratch his pride was to find the cold, inflexible Spaniard.
“You were born your father’s daughter,” he said, with a brevity which was final. Then he bent his eyes searchingly on her. “Is there nothing else—no romantic folly of a young and foolish brain?”
For one moment, so temperate his tone had fallen, she had a mad impulse to tell him the truth, to throw herself upon his mercy and his love. But the thought of whom she might endanger thereby came to her, in time to stay the confession on her lips.
“I am so young, father,” she said. “If it is romance to want to keep my youth a little longer, and then to yield it to a humbler state than this, I am guilty of it, I suppose. But I do so love the simple things of life; and I am not heroic in the least.”
“What need of heroism here, you fool?”
“O, much, much! To throw away all that is dear to me to be an empress!”