s
gratitude in advance.

A short time after, Barbara was packing the gray-haired courier's
knapsack.

She had never yet worked for her father with so much filial solicitude.
Everything that might be of use to him on the way was carefully
considered.

Though she had not been taken into his confidence, she knew the reason
that he had been selected to undertake this toilsome journey.

The Emperor Charles was sending the old man far away that the happiness
of her love might be undisturbed and unclouded, and the consciousness
weighed heavily upon her by no means unduly sensitive conscience.

Wolf, who was already unhappy on her account, had fared the same. When
her father told her that the knight was to accompany him, she had felt as
if an incident of her childhood, which had often disturbed her dreams,
was repeated.

She had been swinging with boyish recklessness in the Woller garden.
Suddenly one of the ropes broke, and the board which supported her feet
turned over out of her reach. For a time, clinging with her hands to the
uninjured rope, she swayed between heaven and earth. No one was near,
and, though she soon stood once more on the firm ground unhurt, the
moment when her feet, during the ascent, lost their support, was
associated with feelings of so much terror that she--who at that time was
considered the bravest of her playfellows--had never forgotten it.

Now she felt as though something similar had befallen her.

She had seen the props on which she might depend removed from under her
feet. If her father and Wolf left her, she would look in vain for counsel
and support.

That her lover was the most powerful sovereign on earth, and she could
appeal to him if she needed help, did not enter her mind. Nay, a vague
foreboding told her that he and what was associated with him formed the
power against which she must struggle.

The sham affection of the aristocratic lady who was to be her chaperon;
the Queen, who last evening had catechised her as if she were a child,
and whom she distrusted; the servile flatterer, Malfalconnet, in whose
mirthful manner that day for the first time she thought she had detected
dislike and slight sarcasm; the imperial love messenger, Don Luis
Quijada, who with icy, dutiful coldness scarcely vouchsafed a word to
her; and, lastly, the confessor Pedro de Soto, who treated her like a
person who needed pity, and probably only awaited a fitting time to hurl
an anathema into her face-