s to him. There he expects to
be free from time-killing business, and to grant his mind that which he
has long desired and a thousand duties forced him to withhold. There, in
quiet leisure, he hopes to strive for knowledge and to penetrate deeply
into all the new things which were discovered, invented, created, and
improved during his reign, and of which he was permitted to learn far
too little thoroughly. He will endeavour to gain a better understanding
of what stirs, fires, angers, and divides the theologians. He desires to
pursue in detail the vast new discoveries of the astronomers, which even
amid the pressure of duties he had explained to him. His inquisitive
mind seeks to know the new discoveries of navigation, the distant
countries which it brought to view. He hopes to search into the plans
and works of the architects of fortifications and makers of maps and,
by no means least, he is anxious to become thoroughly familiar with the
inventions of mechanicians, which have so long aroused his interest."

"He liked to talk to me about these things, and the power of the human
intellect, which now shows the true course of the sun and stars,"
Barbara interrupted with eager assent. "He often showed me the ingenious
wheelwork of his Nuremberg clocks. Once--I still hear the words--he
compared the most delicate with the thousandfold more sublime works of
God, the vast, ceaseless machinery of the universe, where there is no
misplaced spring, no inaccurately adjusted cog in the wheels. Oh, that
glorious intellect! What hours were those when he condescended to point
out to a poor girl like me the eternal chronometers above our heads,
repeat their names, and show the connection between the planets and the
course of earthly events and human lives! O Wolf! how glorious it
was! How my modest mind increased in strength! And when I listened
breathlessly, and he saw how I bowed in mute admiration before his
greatness and called me his dear child, his attentive pupil, and pressed
his lips to my burning brow, can I ever forget that?"

She sobbed aloud as she spoke and, overwhelmed by the grief which
mastered her, covered her face with her hands.

Wolf said nothing. Another had robbed him of the woman he loved, and the
greatest anguish of his life was not yet wholly conquered; but in this
hour he felt that he had no right to be angry with Barbara, for it was
to the greatest of great men that he had been forced to yield. He need
not fee