But though she still retained a portion of her former affection for Wolf Hartschwert, she loved the Emperor Charles with passionate fervour.  Even the marquise did not venture to doubt this.  Often as she had watched the meetings of the lovers, she had marvelled at the youthful ardour of the monarch, the joyous excitement with which Barbara awaited him, and her sorrowful depression when he left her.  During the first week the old noblewoman thought that she had never met a happier pair.  The almoner deemed it unworthy of him to listen to a report of the caresses which she scornfully mentioned.

The time even came when he no longer needed confirmation from others, and forbade himself to doubt Barbara’s fidelity to her religion; for at the end of the first week in Prebrunn she had desired to ask a servant of the Church what she must do to make herself worthy of such abundance of the highest happiness, and to atone for the sin she was committing through her love.

In doing so she had opened her heart to the confessor with childlike frankness, and what De Soto heard on this occasion sincerely delighted him and endeared to him this thoroughly sound, beautiful creature overmastered by a first great passion.  He believed her, and indignantly rejected what the spies afterward brought to him.

Yet he did not close his ears to the marquise when, in her clever, entertaining way, she told him what, against her will, she had overheard in consequence of the careless construction of the little castle, built only for a summer residence, or had seen during a walk in the garden when the shutters, through forgetfulness, had not been closed.

How should he not have heard gladly that the monarch, at every interview with Barbara, listened to her singing with special pleasure?

At first she chose grave, usually even religious songs, and among them Charles’s favourite was the “Quia amore langueo.”

To listen to these deeply felt tones of yearning always seemed to possess a fresh charm for him.

No wonder!

The singer understood how to produce a new effect each time by means of wonderful gradations of expression in the comprehension and execution.

Once she had also succeeded in cheering her lover with Perissone Cambio’s merry singing lesson on the ‘ut re mi fa sol’, and again with Willaert’s laughing song, “Sempre mi ridesta.”

Two days later there had again been a great deal of laughing because Barbara undertook to sing to his Majesty another almost recklessly merry song by the same composer.  The marquise knew it, and declared that Barbara’s style and voice did not suit such things.  She admitted that her execution of serious, especially religious and solemn compositions, was not amiss—­nay, often it was wonderfully fine—­but in such secular tunes her real nature appeared too plainly, and the skilful singer became a Bacchante.

It had been a sorry pleasure to her to watch the boisterous manner and singing of this creature, who had been far too highly favoured by the caprice of Fortune.