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?
No, and again no!
She was no longer poor Wawerl!
She could and would show this, for, like an illumination, words which she had heard the day before in the Golden Cross had flashed into her memory.