merely saw a smile, which he did not know how to interpret,
on her lips. But little as Barbara said about this event, her mind was
often occupied with it.

In the first place, it recalled to her memory the dance under the lindens
at Prebrunn.

Did it not seem as if her ardent royal partner of those days had become
her avenger?

Yet it grieved her that the man whose greatness and power it had grown a
necessity for her to admire had suffered so deep a humiliation and, as at
the time of the May festival under the Ratisbon lindens, the sympathy of
her heart belonged to him to whom she had apparently preferred the
treacherous Saxon duke.

The treaty of Passau, which soon followed his flight, was to impose upon
the monarch things scarcely less hard to bear; for it compelled him to
allow the Protestants in Germany the free exercise of their religion, and
to release his prisoners, the Elector John Frederick of Saxony and the
Landgrave Philip of Hesse.

Whatever befell the sovereign she brought into connection with herself.
Charles's motto had now become unattainable for him, as since her loss of
voice it had been for her. Her heart bled unseen, and his misfortune
inflicted new wounds upon it. How he, toward whom the whole world looked,
and whose sensitive soul endured with so much difficulty the slightest
transgression of his will and his inclination, would recover from the
destruction of the most earnest, nay, the most sacred aspirations of a
whole life, was utterly incomprehensible to her. To restore the unity of
religion had been as warm a desire of his heart as the cultivation of
singing had been cherished by hers, and the treaty of Passau ceded to the
millions of German Protestants the right to remain separated from the
Catholic Church. This must utterly cloud, darken, poison his already
joyless existence. Spite of the wrong he had done her, how gladly, had
she not been lost to art, she would now have tried upon him its
elevating, consoling power!

From her old confessor, her husband, and others she learned that Charles
scarcely paid any further heed to the political affairs of the German
nation, which had once been so important to him; and with intense
indignation she heard the fellow-countrymen whom her husband brought to
the house declare that, in her German native land, Charles was now as
bitterly hated as he had formerly been loved and reverenced.

The imperial crown would lapse to his brother; Ferdinand's so