uired by the
service, which rarely permitted him to remain long in his own house.

Barbara did not miss him; nay, she was happiest during his absence.

After glancing into the nursery, she retired to her quiet chamber, where
her harp stood and the lutes hung which often for hours supplied the
place of her lost voice, and sat down at her spinning wheel.

She turned it thoughtfully, but the thread broke, and her hands fell
into her lap. Her mind had again found the way to the house in the park
and to her John, her own, wonderful, imperial child, and lingered there
until from the next room the cry of an infant was heard and a woman's
voice singing it to sleep. Frau Lamperi, who had made herself a part of
the little household, and beheld in its master the incarnation of every
manly virtue, was lulling the baby to rest. Beside it slept another
child, a boy two years old. Both were hers, yet, though the infant
raised its voice still louder, she remained at the spinning wheel,
dreaming on.

In this way, and while playing on the harp and the lutes, her solitude
was best endured. Her husband's journeys often led him through the whole
Netherlands and the valley of the Rhine as far as Strasbourg and Basle,
and her father had returned to Ratisbon.

She had found no new friends in Brussels, and had not endeavoured to
gain any.

Loneliness, which she had dreaded in the heyday of her early youth, no
longer alarmed her, for quiet reveries and dreams led her back to the
time when life had been beautiful, when she had enjoyed the love of
the greatest of mortals, and art had given her existence an exquisite
consecration.

With the loss of her voice--she was now aware of it--many of the best
things in her life had also ceased to exist. Her singing might perhaps
have lured back her inconstant lover, and had she come to Brussels
possessing the mastery of her voice which was hers during that happy
time in May, her life would have assumed a totally different form.

Gombert, who had induced her to move hither, had urged her with the best
intentions during their drive to Landshut to change her residence. When
he did so, however, Barbara was still connected with the Emperor, and
he was animated by the hope that the trouble in her throat would be
temporary.

It would have been easy to throw wide to a singer of her ability the
doors of the aristocratic houses which were open to him; for, except his
professional comrades, he associated on