sband, and she found strength to shut it within herself.

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 spectat