cted with specially joyful
security rarely happened,--constantly forced upon her mind the, fear that
the dead man's will would consign John to the cloister.

So the next weeks passed in a constant alternation of oppressive fears
and aspiring hopes, the nights in torturing terrors.

All the women of the upper classes wore mourning, and with double reason;
for, soon after the news of the Emperor's death reached Brussels, King
Philip's second wife, Mary Tudor, of England, also died. Therefore no one
noticed that Barbara wore widow's weeds, and she was glad that she could
do so without wounding Pyramus.

A part of the elaborate funeral rites which King Philip arranged in
Brussels during the latter part of December in honour of his dead father
was the procession which afforded the authorities of the Brabant capital
an opportunity to display the inventive faculty, the love of splendour,
the learning, and the wit which, as members of flourishing literary
societies, they constantly exercised. In the pageant was a ship with
black sails, at whose keel, mast, and helm stood Hope with her anchor,
Faith with her chalice, and Love with the burning heart. Other similar
scenic pieces made the sincerity of the grief for the dead questionable,
and yet many real tears were shed for him. True, the wind which swelled
the sails of the sable ship bore also many an accusation and curse; among
the spectators of the procession there were only too many whose mourning
robes were worn not for the dead monarch, but their own nearest
relatives, whom his pitiless edicts had given to the executioner as
readers of the Bible or heterodox.

These displays, so pleasing to the people of her time and her new home,
were by no means great or magnificent enough for Barbara. Even the most
superb show seemed to her too trivial for this dead man.

She was never absent from any mass for the repose of his soul, and she
not only took part outwardly in the sacred ceremony, but followed it with
fervent devotion. As a transfigured spirit, he would perceive how she had
once hated him; but he should also see how tenderly she still loved him.

Now that he was dead, it would be proved in what way he had remembered
the son whom, in his solitude, he had learned to love, what life path
John had been assigned by his father.

But longingly as Barbara thought of Spain and of her boy, often as she
went to the Dubois house and to the regent's home to obtain news, nothing
cou