Haidplatz, had met with the same fate,
and this sacred witness of former days had likewise been sacrificed to
the iconoclasm of the followers of the new Protestant faith. This also
grieved him, and urged him to go from street to street, from church to
church, from monastery to monastery, from one of the chapels which
no great mansion in his native land lacked to another, in order to
ascertain what else religious fanaticism had destroyed; but he was
obliged to hasten if he wished to be received by those in his home whom
he most desired to see.

The windows of the second story in the Golden Cross, opposite to the
Ark, were brilliantly lighted. The Emperor Charles lodged there, and
probably his royal sister also. Wolf had given his heart to her with
the devotion with which he had always clung to every one to whom he was
indebted for any kindness. He knew her imperial brother's convictions,
too, and when he saw at one of the windows a man's figure leaning,
motionless against the casement with his hand pressed upon his brow,
he realized what deep indignation had doubtless seized upon him at the
sight of the changes which had taken place here during the five years of
his absence.

But Emperor Charles was not the man to allow matters which aroused his
wrath and strong disapproval to pass unpunished. Wolf suspected that the
time was not far distant when yonder monarch at the window, who had won
so many victories, would have a reckoning with the Smalcalds, the allied
Protestants of Germany, and his vivid imagination surrounded him with an
almost mystical power.

He would surely succeed in becoming the master of the Protestant
princes; but was the steel sword the right weapon to destroy this
agitation of the soul which had sprung from the inmost depths of
the German nature? He knew the firm, obstinate followers of the new
doctrine, for there had been a time when his own young mind had leaned
toward it.

Since those days, however, events had happened which had bound him
by indestructible fetters to the old faith. He had vowed to his dying
mother to remain faithful to the Holy Church and loyally to keep his
oath. It was not difficult for one of his modest temperament to be
content with the position of spectator of the play of life which he
occupied. He was not born for conflict, and from the seat to which he
had retired he thought he had perceived that the burden of existence was
easier to bear, and the individual not only ob