The husband’s intention of making the unbending iron pliant was wholly changed; the recruiting officer whom his companions and subordinates knew and feared as one of the sternest of their number, showed himself to Barbara the most yielding of men.  The passionate tenderness with which he loved her had only increased with time, and the stern soldier’s subjection to her will went so far that, even when he would gladly have expressed disapproval, he usually omitted to do so, because he dreaded to lessen the favour which she showed him in place of genuine love, and which he needed.  Besides, she gave him little cause for displeasure; she did her duty, and strove to render his outward life a pleasant one.

Even after her father had left her she remained a wife who satisfied his heart.  He had learned the coolness of her nature in his first attempts to woo her in Ratisbon and, as at that time, he whom the service frequently detained from her for long periods regarded it as a merit.

So he wrote her father letters expressing his gratification, and the replies which the captain sent to Brussels were in a similar tone.

Barbara had obtained for him his own house, for which he had longed.  He felt comfortable there, and what he lacked in his home he found at the Red Cock or the Black Bear.  An elderly Landshut widow, a relative, acted as his housekeeper and provided in the best possible manner for his comfort.

Whoever met the stately mustering officer alone or arm in arm with his beautiful young wife, whose golden hair had grown out again, must have believed him a happy man; and so he would have been had not some singular habits which Barbara possessed made him uneasy.  At first the reveries into which she often sank, and which were so unlike her former self, had been still worse.  He did not know that the improvement had taken place since she had discovered her John’s abode and been permitted sometimes to see him.  Barbara’s husband and father supposed that the child which she had given to the Emperor was dead; both had placed this interpretation upon her brief statement that it had been taken from her, and afterward delicacy of feeling prevented any other allusion to this painful subject.

Besides this proneness to reverie, Barbara’s husband was sometimes disturbed by the carelessness with which she neglected the most important domestic matters if there was an entertainment or exhibition which the Emperor Charles attended; and, finally, there was something in her manner to the children, whom Pyramus loved above all things, which disturbed, incensed, and wounded him, yet which he felt that neither threats nor stern interposition could change.

He possessed no defence against the reveries except a warning or a jesting word.  Delight in brilliant spectacles was doubtless natural to her disposition, and as Pyramus not only loved but esteemed her, it was repugnant to his feelings to watch her.  Yet when, nevertheless, he once followed her steps, he had found her, according to her expressed intention, among other women in St. Gudule’s Cathedral.  Her eyes, which he watched intently, were constantly turned toward the great personages whose presence adorned the festival—­the Emperor and Queen Mary of Hungary.