hern ones also hatred of the Spaniards was already bursting into
flames, and Requesens was too weak to extinguish them.

The King and Barbara's political friends perceived that Alba's pitiless,
murderous severity had injured the cause of the crown and the Church far
more than it had benefited them. Personally, he had treated her on the
whole kindly, but he had inflicted two offences which were hard to
conquer. In the first place, he urged her to leave Brussels and settle in
Mons; and, secondly, he had refused to receive her Conrad, who had grown
up into a steady, good-looking, but in no respect remarkable young man,
in one of his regiments, with the prospect of promotion to the rank of
officer.

In both cases she had not remained quiet and, at the second audience
which the duke gave her, her hot blood, though it had grown so much
cooler, played her a trick, and she became involved in a vehement
argument with him. In the course of this he had been compelled to be
frank, and she now knew that Alba had persuaded her to change her
residence at the King's desire, and why it was done.

She afterward learned from acquaintances that the duke had said one was
apt to be the loser in a dispute with her; yet she had yielded, though
solely and entirely to benefit her John, but she could not help
confessing to herself that her residence in the capital could not be
agreeable to him. The highest Spanish officials and military commanders
lived there, as well as the ambassadors of foreign powers, and it was not
desirable to remind them of the maternal descent of the general who now
belonged to the King's family.

The case was somewhat similar, as Alba himself had confessed to her, with
regard to her son Conrad's promotion to the rank of an officer; for if he
attained that position he might, as the brother of Don John of Austria,
make pretensions which threatened to place the hero of Lepanto in a
false, nay, perhaps unpleasant position. This, too, she did not desire.
But in removing from Brussels she had possibly rendered Don John a
greater service than she admitted to herself, for, since her son's
brilliant successes had made her happy and her external circumstances had
permitted it, she had emerged from the miserable seclusion of former
years.

Her dress, too, she now suited to the position which she arrogated to
herself. But in doing so she had become a personage who could scarcely be
overlooked, and she rarely failed to be presen