“Highness,” she said, “may I speak to you frankly?”
“Please do,” Hedwig replied. “Everybody does, anyhow. Especially when it is something disagreeable.”
Olga Loschek watched her warily. She knew the family as only the outsider could know it; knew that Hedwig, who would have disclaimed the fact, was like her mother in some things, notably in a disposition to be mild until a certain moment, submissive, even acquiescent, and then suddenly to become, as it were, a royalty and grow cold, haughty. But if Hedwig was driven in those days, so was the Countess, desperate and driven to desperate methods.
“I am presuming, Highness, on your mother’s kindness to me, and your own, to speak frankly.”
“Well, go on,” said Hedwig resignedly. But the next words brought her up in her chair.
“Are you going to allow your life to be ruined?” was what the Countess said.
Careful! Hedwig had thrown up her head and looked at her with hostile eyes. But the next moment she had forgotten she was a princess, and the granddaughter to the King, and remembered only that she was a woman, and terror-stricken. She flung out her arms, and then buried her face in them.
“How can I help it?” she said.
“How can you do it?” Olga Loschek countered. “After all, it is you who must do this thing. No one else. It is you they are offering on the altar of their ambition.”
“Ambition?”