d, as it were, descended into
the grave in order to make him earlier the heir of all his power and
wealth.

Now Barbara fancied that again--she knew not for what hundredth
time--the Frieslander's exclamation, "Debts! debts!" rang in her ears,
and at the same time she thought of the boy in Spain who had here been
disinherited, and must be hidden in a monastery that the other son
of the same father, the diminutive upstart Philip, puffed up with
arrogance, might sleep more quietly. For one son the unjust man whom she
loved was ready to die before his last hour came, in order to give him
all that he possessed; for the other he could find nothing save a monk's
cowl. Instead of the yearning for John, of which Wolf had spoken and
she, blind fool, believed, he thought of him with petty fears of the
claims by which he might injure his favoured brother. No warm impulse
of paternal tenderness stirred the breast of the man whose heart was
hardened, who understood how to divest himself of the warmest love as he
now cast aside the crown and the purple of royalty.

These torturing thoughts so powerfully affected Barbara that she only
half heard what Hannibal was saying about the Emperor's admonition to
his son to hold fast to justice, law, and the Catholic Church. But when
Granvelle's faithful follower, in an agitated tone, went on to relate
how Charles had besought the forgiveness of Providence for all the sins
and errors which he had committed, and added that he would remember all
who had rendered him happy by their love and obedience in every prayer
which he addressed to the Being to whom the remnant of his life should
be devoted, the ex-singer's breath came quicker, her small hands
clinched, and the question whether she had failed in love and obedience
before he basely cast her off forced itself upon her mind, and with it
the other, whether he would also include in his prayers her whom he had
ill-treated and mortally insulted.

These thoughts lent her features so gloomy an expression that it would
have offended the Emperor Charles's ardent admirer if he had noticed it.
But the scene which, with tears in his eyes, he now described absorbed
his attention so completely that he forgot everything around him and,
as it were, gazed into his own soul while picturing to himself and his
listener how the monarch, with a pallid, ashen countenance, had sunk
back upon his throne and wept like a child.

At this spectacle the whole assembly,