gn, eagerly and skilfully helping in many ways; and when in the
morning the doctor appeared she was firmly convinced that her vow had
saved the sick boy's life. The crisis was over.

Henceforth, whenever the yearning for the distant John seized upon her
with special power, she thought of that night, and loaded the little
sons near her with tokens of the tenderest love.

On that morning of commencing convalescence her husband's grateful kiss
pleased her.

True, during the time that followed, Pyramus succeeded no better than
before in warming his wife's cold heart, but Barbara omitted many things
which had formerly clouded his happiness.

The Emperor Charles had again gone to foreign countries, and therefore
festivals and shows no longer attracted her. She rarely allowed herself
a visit to Frau Dubois, but, above all, she talked with her boys and
about them like every other mother. It even seemed to Pyramus as though
her old affection for the Emperor Charles was wholly dead; for when,
in November of the following year, agitated to the very depths of his
being, he brought her the tidings that the Emperor had been surprised
and almost captured at Innsbruck by Duke Maurice of Saxony, who owed
him the Elector's hat, and had only escaped the misfortune by a hurried
flight to Carinthia, he merely saw a smile, which he did not know how to
interpret, on her lips. But little as Barbara said about this event, her
mind was often occupied with it.

In the first place, it recalled to her memory the dance under the
lindens at Prebrunn.

Did it not seem as if her ardent royal partner of those days had become
her avenger?

Yet it grieved her that the man whose greatness and power it had grown
a necessity for her to admire had suffered so deep a humiliation and, as
at the time of the May festival under the Ratisbon lindens, the sympathy
of her heart belonged to him to whom she had apparently preferred the
treacherous Saxon duke.

The treaty of Passau, which soon followed his flight, was to impose upon
the monarch things scarcely less hard to bear; for it compelled him to
allow the Protestants in Germany the free exercise of their religion,
and to release his prisoners, the Elector John Frederick of Saxony and
the Landgrave Philip of Hesse.

Whatever befell the sovereign she brought into connection with herself.
Charles's motto had now become unattainable for him, as since her loss
of voice it had been for her. Her heart bled un