The highest Spanish officials and military commanders
lived there, as well as the ambassadors of foreign powers, and it was
not desirable to remind them of the maternal descent of the general who
now belonged to the King's family.

The case was somewhat similar, as Alba himself had confessed to her,
with regard to her son Conrad's promotion to the rank of an officer;
for if he attained that position he might, as the brother of Don John of
Austria, make pretensions which threatened to place the hero of Lepanto
in a false, nay, perhaps unpleasant position. This, too, she did not
desire. But in removing from Brussels she had possibly rendered Don John
a greater service than she admitted to herself, for, since her son's
brilliant successes had made her happy and her external circumstances
had permitted it, she had emerged from the miserable seclusion of former
years.

Her dress, too, she now suited to the position which she arrogated to
herself. But in doing so she had become a personage who could scarcely
be overlooked, and she rarely failed to be present on the very occasions
which brought together the most aristocratic Spanish society in
Brussels.

So, after a fresh dispute with Alba, in which the victor on many a
battlefield was forced to yield, she had obtained his consent to retire
to Ghent instead of Mons.

True, the duke would have preferred to induce her to go to Spain, and
tried to persuade her to do so by the assurance that the King himself
desired to receive her there.

But she had been warned.

Through Hannibal Melas and other members of her own party she had
learned that Philip intended, if she came to Spain, to remove her from
the eyes of the world by placing her in a convent, and never had she
felt less inclination to take the veil.

Her departure from Brussels had done Alba and his functionaries a
service, for she had constantly forced herself into the government
building to obtain news of her son.

The great and opulent city of Ghent, the birthplace of the Emperor
Charles, of which he had once said to Francis I, the King of France,
that Paris would go into his glove (Gant), had been chosen by Barbara
for several reasons. The principal one was that she would find there
several old friends of former days, one of whom, her singing-master
Feys, had promised to accept her voice and enable her to serve her art
again with full pleasure.

The other was Hannibal Melas, who before Granvelle's fall had be