After the thunderstorm the weather had grown cloudy and cool.  Perhaps the change had caused his increased suffering and unhappy mood.  But the true reason was doubtless the resolution formed the night before, and which now by day seemed more difficult to execute than he had thought at the priedieu.  He was still resolved to keep it, but earthly life appeared less short, and he could not conceal from himself that, without Barbara’s sunny cheerfulness, bewitching tenderness, and, alas! without her singing, his future existence would lack its greatest charm.  His life would be like this gloomy day.  Put he would not relinquish what he had once firmly determined and proved to himself by reasoning to be the correct course.

He could not succeed in burying himself in charts and plans as usual and, while imagining how life could be endured without the woman he loved, he pushed the papers aside.

In days like these, when the old ache again attacked him, Barbara and her singing had brightened the dreary gloom and lessened the pain, or she had caressed and sung it entirely away.  He seemed to himself like a surly patient who throws aside the helpful medicine because it once tasted badly to him and was an annoyance to others.  Yet no.  It contained poison also, so it was wise to put it away.  But had not Dr. Mathys told him yesterday that the strongest remedial power was concealed in poisons, and that they were the most effective medicines?  Ought he not to examine once more the reasons which had led him to this last resolution?  He bowed his head with an irresolution foreign to his nature, and when his greyhound touched his aching foot he pushed the animal angrily away.

The confessor De Soto found him in this mood at his first visit.

Ere he crossed the threshold he saw that Charles was suffering and felt troubled by some important matter, and soon learned what he desired to know.  But if Charles expected the Dominican to greet his decision with grateful joy, he was mistaken, for De Soto had long since relinquished the suspicion which had prejudiced him against Barbara and, on the contrary, with the Bishop of Arras, had reached the certainty that the love which united the monarch to the singer would benefit him.

Both knew the danger which threatened the sovereign from his tendency to melancholy, and now that he saw his efforts to urge the Emperor to a war with the Smalcalds crowned with success, he wished to keep alive in him the joyousness which Barbara, and she alone, had aroused and maintained.

So he used the convincing eloquence characteristic of him to shake the monarch’s resolve, and lead him back to the woman he loved.