Barbara’s features brightened and, as she saw how happy it made the Maltese to be the bearer of so pleasant a message, she forced herself to give a joyous expression to her gratitude.  In the evening, and during a sleepless night, she considered whether she should make use of the invitation.  What she had expected for herself and her child from Charles’s abdication had been mere chimeras of the brain, and what could this spectacle offer her?  She would only behold with her eyes what she had often enough imagined with the utmost distinctness—­the great monarch divested of his grandeur and all his dignities.

But Granvelle’s message that she was one cf those who stood nearest to the abdicating sovereign constantly echoed in her ears, and her absence from this ceremony would have seemed to her unnatural—­nay, an offence against something necessary.

Her husband was pleased with the great minister’s kindness to his wife.  He had nothing to do in the palace, but he intended to look for the children, who had gone there before noon with Frau Lamperi, that they might get the best possible view of the approach of the princes and dignitaries.

Barbara herself was to use a litter.  The ex-’garde-robiere’ had helped her put on her gala attire, and Pyramus assured his wife that every one would consider her the handsomest and most elegant lady in the galleries.  She knew that he was right, and listened with pleasure, deeply as resentment and disappointment burdened her soul.

Then the knocker on the door rapped.  The litter-bearers had probably come.  But no!  The Flemish maid, who had opened the door, announced that a messenger was waiting outside with a letter which he could deliver only to the master or the mistress.

Pyramus went into the entry, and his long absence was already making Barbara uneasy, when he returned with bowed head and, after many words of preparation, informed her that her father was very ill and, finally, that apoplexy had put a swift and easy end to his life.

Then a great and genuine grief seized upon her with all its power.  Everything that the simple-hearted, lovable man, who had guarded her child hood so tenderly and her girlhood with such solicitude and devotion, had been to her, returned to her memory in all its vividness.  In him she had lost the last person whose right to judge her conduct she acknowledged, the only one whom she had good reason to be sure cared for her welfare as much as, nay, perhaps more than, his own.

The litter, Granvelle’s message, the Emperor’s abdication ceremony, everything that had just wounded, angered, and disturbed her, was forgotten.

She gently refused the consolation of her husband, who in the captain had lost a dear friend and sincerely mourned his death, and entreated him to leave her alone; but when her sons returned and joyously described the magnificent spectacle on which they had feasted their eyes outside of the palace, she drew them toward her with special tenderness, and tried to make them understand that they would never again see the good grandfather who had loved them all so dearly.