listened with pleasure,
deeply as resentment and disappointment burdened her soul.

Then the knocker on the door rapped. The litter-bearers had probably
come. But no! The Flemish maid, who had opened the door, announced that
a messenger was waiting outside with a letter which he could deliver
only to the master or the mistress.

Pyramus went into the entry, and his long absence was already making
Barbara uneasy, when he returned with bowed head and, after many words
of preparation, informed her that her father was very ill and, finally,
that apoplexy had put a swift and easy end to his life.

Then a great and genuine grief seized upon her with all its power.
Everything that the simple-hearted, lovable man, who had guarded
her child hood so tenderly and her girlhood with such solicitude and
devotion, had been to her, returned to her memory in all its vividness.
In him she had lost the last person whose right to judge her conduct she
acknowledged, the only one whom she had good reason to be sure cared for
her welfare as much as, nay, perhaps more than, his own.

The litter, Granvelle's message, the Emperor's abdication ceremony,
everything that had just wounded, angered, and disturbed her, was
forgotten.

She gently refused the consolation of her husband, who in the captain
had lost a dear friend and sincerely mourned his death, and entreated
him to leave her alone; but when her sons returned and joyously
described the magnificent spectacle on which they had feasted their eyes
outside of the palace, she drew them toward her with special tenderness,
and tried to make them understand that they would never again see the
good grandfather who had loved them all so dearly.

But the older boy, Conrad, only gazed at her wonderingly, and asked why
she was weeping; and the younger one did not understand her at all,
and went on talking about the big soldier who wanted to lift him on his
piebald horse. To the child death is only slumber, and life being awake
to new games and pleasures.

Barbara said this to her husband when he wished to check the merry
laughter of the little ones, and then went to her chamber.

There she strove to think of the dead man, and she succeeded, but with
the memory of the sturdy old hero constantly blended the image of the
feeble man who to-day was voluntarily surrendering all the gifts of
fortune which she--oh, how willingly! would have received for the son
whom he desired to withdraw from the wo