Sarolta had sunk on a hot-water cushion in one of the chapels of the Capuchin Church, after an involuntary appeal to her archduchess to pray no longer than she could help. The friar, a dark blur in his brown robes, unlocked the door that opens on the winding stair sacred to the House of Hapsburg. As Ranata carried a lighted taper in her own hand, she motioned to him to walk behind her, and picked her way on the uneven stones worn by four centuries of men and women who had gone down with the dead, or to pray among the ruins of those who had ruled and loved and oppressed, or battled in secret and impotence with the wretched comedy of their existence. Twice before--since her early girlhood, when her tutor in history had included an occasional visit to the Hapsburg dust in his course--had Ranata descended this stair: behind the coffin of Rudolf, and the coffin of her mother. The first time she had been blind and dumb with grief; the second, horror-stricken as she still was, she had meditated sadly upon the conquest of life over the charming and singular woman she had known so little. To-night, as she reached the foot of the stair, and held the taper aloft, she was conscious of little but the cold and the dank smell of death, which in spite of glass and lead and bronze, and robbed of its final offensiveness, pervades the crypt. It is an odor hardly definable; it might be the very breath of Death himself rising thickly through earth and mould. Ranata shuddered and drew her cloak about her, but walked resolutely down between the long rows of sarcophagi, elaborate and ostentatiously simple, crowding close behind the bars. She was thankful that her father had insisted upon the escort of the friar; but when she came to the great gates behind which Maria Theresia still reigns in the pomp of death over those that have followed her, and her silent attendant had turned the key, she motioned to him to remain without. She stood for a moment looking with a curious impersonality, of which she could not divest herself, at the magnificent leaden sarcophagus, on its pedestal, of one of the few great rulers of Austria. The carving and chasing, the bas-reliefs and fixtures, were so elaborate and beautiful that she caught herself wondering how many years the august remains had awaited their final state, or if the far-sighted Empress had set the craftsmen to work long before her death. She was a practical soul, and it was likely. At her feet, in the plainest of leaden coffins, lay the husband she had loved and snubbed. About her, in receptacles of varying art and costliness, were nine of her sixteen children.