The sensuous, fair-haired Duchess of Aerschot, the dark-eyed Cornelia Annoni of Milan, the devout Dolores Gonzaga, with her large, calm, enthusiastic eyes, and again and again, crowding all the others into the background, the timid Johanna van der Gheynst, who under her delicate frame concealed a volcano of ardent passion.  She had given him a daughter whose head was now adorned by a crown.  In spite of the brief duration of their love bond, she had been clearer to him than all the rest—­clearer even than the woman to whom the sacrament of marriage afterward united him.  And she of whom seven years ago death had bereft him?

At this question a bitter smile hovered around his full lips.  How much better love than hers he had known!  And how easy Isabella had rendered it not to weary of her, for during his long journeys and frequent dangerous campaigns, instead of accompanying him, she had led in some carefully guarded castle a life that suited her quiet tastes.

A sorrowful smile curled his lips as he recalled the agreement which they had made just before a separation.  At that time both were young, yet how willingly she had accepted his proposal that, when age approached, they should separate forever, that she in one cloister and he in another might prepare for the end of life!

What reply would a woman with true love in her heart have made to such a demand?

No, no, Isabella had felt as little genuine love for him as he for her!  Her death had been a sorrow to him, but he had shed no tears over it.

He could not weep.  He no longer knew whether he was able to do so when a child.  Since his beard had grown, at any rate, his eyes had remained dry.  The words of the Roman satirist, that tears were the best portion of all human life, returned to his memory.  Would he himself ever experience the relief which they were said to afford the human heart?

But who among the living would he have deemed worthy of them?  When his insane mother died, he could not help considering the poor Queen fortunate because Heaven had at last released her from such a condition.  Of the children whom his wife Isabella and Johanna van der Gheynst had given him, he did not even think.  An icy atmosphere emanated from his son Philip which froze every warm feeling that encountered it.  He remembered his daughter with pleasure, but how rarely he was permitted to enjoy her society!  Besides, he had done enough for his posterity, more than enough.  To increase the grandeur of his family and render it the most powerful reigning house in the world, he had become prematurely old; had undertaken superhuman tasks of toil and care; even now he would permit himself no repose.  The consciousness of having fulfilled his duty to his family and the Church might have comforted him in this hour, but the plus ultra—­more, farther—­which had so often led him into the conflict for the dream of a world sovereignty, the grandeur of his own race, and against the foes of his holy faith, now met the barrier of a more powerful fate.  Instead of advancing, he had seemed, since the defeat at Algiers, to go backward.