How desolate her heart seemed!  It had lost its most distinguished object of love or hate.

Through long days she devoted herself in quiet seclusion to the memory of the dead, but soon her active imagination unfolded its wings again, and with the new grief mingled faint hopes for the boy in Spain, which increased to lofty anticipations and torturing anxiety.

The imperial father was dead.  What now awaited the omnipotent ruler’s son?

How had Charles determined his fate?

Was it possible that he still intended him for the monastic life, now that he had become acquainted with his talents and tastes?

Since Barbara had learned that her son had won his father’s heart, and that the Emperor, as it were, had made him his own with a kiss, she had grown confident in the hope that Charles would bestow upon him the grandeur, honours, and splendour which she had anticipated when she resigned him at Landshut, and to which his birth gave him a claim.  But her early experience that what she expected with specially joyful security rarely happened,—­constantly forced upon her mind the, fear that the dead man’s will would consign John to the cloister.

So the next weeks passed in a constant alternation of oppressive fears and aspiring hopes, the nights in torturing terrors.

All the women of the upper classes wore mourning, and with double reason; for, soon after the news of the Emperor’s death reached Brussels, King Philip’s second wife, Mary Tudor, of England, also died.  Therefore no one noticed that Barbara wore widow’s weeds, and she was glad that she could do so without wounding Pyramus.

A part of the elaborate funeral rites which King Philip arranged in Brussels during the latter part of December in honour of his dead father was the procession which afforded the authorities of the Brabant capital an opportunity to display the inventive faculty, the love of splendour, the learning, and the wit which, as members of flourishing literary societies, they constantly exercised.  In the pageant was a ship with black sails, at whose keel, mast, and helm stood Hope with her anchor, Faith with her chalice, and Love with the burning heart.  Other similar scenic pieces made the sincerity of the grief for the dead questionable, and yet many real tears were shed for him.  True, the wind which swelled the sails of the sable ship bore also many an accusation and curse; among the spectators of the procession there were only too many whose mourning robes were worn not for the dead monarch, but their own nearest relatives, whom his pitiless edicts had given to the executioner as readers of the Bible or heterodox.

These displays, so pleasing to the people of her time and her new home, were by no means great or magnificent enough for Barbara.  Even the most superb show seemed to her too trivial for this dead man.

She was never absent from any mass for the repose of his soul, and she not only took part outwardly in the sacred ceremony, but followed it with fervent devotion.  As a transfigured spirit, he would perceive how she had once hated him; but he should also see how tenderly she still loved him.