cs were treated.

When the monarch, it was often said, was no longer the Charles to whom
the provinces owed great benefits and who had won many hearts, but
his Spanish son, Philip, the chains would be broken, and this shameful
bloodshed would be stopped; but her husband declared such predictions
idle boasting, and Barbara willingly believed him because she wished
that he might be right.

In the officer's eyes all heretics deserved death, and he agreed with
Barbara that the Emperor Charles's wisdom took the right course in all
cases.

His son Philip was obedient to his father, and would certainly continue
to wield the sceptre according to his wishes.

The breath of liberty, which was beginning to stir faintly in the
provinces through which he so often travelled, could not escape
Pyramus's notice, but he saw in it only the mutinous efforts of
shameless rebels and misguided men, who deserved punishment. The quiet
seclusion in which Barbara lived rendered it easy to win her over to her
husband's view of this noble movement; besides, it was directed against
the unhappy man whom she would willingly have seen spared any fresh
anxiety, and who had proved thousands of times how much he preferred the
Netherlands to any other of his numerous kingdoms.

Hitherto Barbara had troubled herself very little about political
affairs, and her interest in them died completely when a visitor called
who threw them, as well as everything else, wholly into the shade.

CHAPTER XIII.

Wolf Hartschwert had come to Brussels and sought Barbara.

Her husband was attending to the duties of his office in the Rhine
country when she received her former lover. Had Pyramus been present, he
might perhaps have considered the knight a less dangerous opponent than
seven years before, for a great change had taken place in his outer man.
The boyish appearance which at that time still clung to him had vanished
and, by constant intercourse with the Castilian nobility, he had
acquired a manly, self-assured bearing perfectly in harmony with his age
and birth.

As he sat opposite to Barbara for the first time, she could not avert
her eyes from him and, with both his hands clasped in hers, she let him
tell her of his journey to Brussels and his efforts to find her in the
great city. Meanwhile she scarcely heeded the purport of his words; it
was enough to feel the influence exerted by the tone of his voice, and
to be reminded by his features and his ev