One, and the most important of these documents, was a long and confidential letter from the emperor to the town council and the chief heads of conventual houses in Klosterheim. It contained a rapid summary of the principal events in her lover's life, from his infancy, when some dreadful domestic tragedy had thrown him upon the emperor's protection, to his present period of early manhood, when his own sword and distinguished talents had raised him to a brilliant name and a high military rank in the imperial service. What were the circumstances of that tragedy, as a case sufficiently well known to those whom he addressed, or to be collected from accompanying papers, the emperor did not say. But he lavished every variety of praise upon Maximilian, with a liberality that won tears of delight from the solitary young lady, as she now sat at midnight looking over these gracious testimonies to her lover's merit. A theme so delightful to Paulina could not be unseasonable at any time; and never did her thoughts revert to him more fondly than at this moment, when she so much needed his protecting arm. Yet the emperor, she was aware, must have some more special motive for enlarging upon this topic than his general favor to Maximilian. What this could be, in a case so closely connecting the parties to the correspondence on both sides with Klosterheim, a little interested her curiosity. And, on looking more narrowly at the accompanying documents, in one which had been most pointedly referred to by the emperor she found some disclosures on the subject of her lover's early misfortunes, which, whilst they filled her with horror and astonishment, elevated the natural pretensions of Maximilian in point of birth and descent more nearly to a level with the splendor of his self-created distinctions; and thus crowned him, who already lived in her apprehension as the very model of a hero, with the only advantages that he had ever been supposed to want--the interest which attaches to unmerited misfortunes, and the splendor of an illustrious descent.