Now it so happened that the church in which Thaddeus's marriage with Hilda Tressilian had taken place had been subsequently destroyed by fire, and with it the documentary evidence tending to prove Barbara's identity and legitimacy.
Thaddeus was thus unable to establish her relationship to himself. The Diet might be pardoned for refusing to take his bare word as proof. Bora, too, would loudly declare that Barbara was a supposititious child brought forward to deprive him of the throne.
In view, therefore, of her marvellous resemblance to Natalie, it was decided by the prince and the cardinal that Barbara should lose her own identity and should personate the late princess.
This Barbara had done, and with such art and tact that not even Bora suspected the pardonable, if not altogether innocent manœuvre by which she had contrived to secure her rights.
"With the exception of yourself," said Barbara in conclusion, "the cardinal is the sole depositary of my secret, for not even to Zabern, my confidant in most things, have I revealed it. Now you understand the power which the cardinal professes to wield over me, and why he insolently presumes to menace me with deposition. But he shall not succeed. Zabern is my hope. Zabern, crafty and subtle, will find a way of defeating the cardinal's machinations; and then," she murmured, "and then—he shall regret his threat to dethrone the Princess of Czernova."
Barbara, menaced on the one side by the cardinal and on the other by the Czar, had not a very firm hold on her throne, at least in Paul's judgment; and now by her attachment to himself she was still further imperilling her position. But he ceased to argue the matter. Any man with those lovely arms around him might be pardoned for shutting his eyes to the future.
"And so your mother was an Englishwoman?" he remarked, seeing in that fact a possible explanation of Barbara's pro-Anglian tastes.
"Yes, I am half English," she replied, "and I am glad for your sake that I am such. You have not told any one of our prior meeting in Dalmatia?"
"I have kept it a secret."
"Let it remain such. And our love, too, must be kept secret,—at least, for a time," she added with a sigh, for she loved open dealing, and the hiding of her real faith, together with the assumption of her sister's name, had never ceased to be a source of pain.