On the stairs he was detained.  Malfalconnet handed him two heavy rolls of gold for the expenses of the journey, and enjoined it upon him to be ready to set out early the following morning.  He might make his own arrangements with Sir Wolf Hartschwert, and assure him of his Majesty’s gratitude in advance.

A short time after, Barbara was packing the gray-haired courier’s knapsack.

She had never yet worked for her father with so much filial solicitude.  Everything that might be of use to him on the way was carefully considered.

Though she had not been taken into his confidence, she knew the reason that he had been selected to undertake this toilsome journey.

The Emperor Charles was sending the old man far away that the happiness of her love might be undisturbed and unclouded, and the consciousness weighed heavily upon her by no means unduly sensitive conscience.

Wolf, who was already unhappy on her account, had fared the same.  When her father told her that the knight was to accompany him, she had felt as if an incident of her childhood, which had often disturbed her dreams, was repeated.

She had been swinging with boyish recklessness in the Woller garden.  Suddenly one of the ropes broke, and the board which supported her feet turned over out of her reach.  For a time, clinging with her hands to the uninjured rope, she swayed between heaven and earth.  No one was near, and, though she soon stood once more on the firm ground unhurt, the moment when her feet, during the ascent, lost their support, was associated with feelings of so much terror that she—­who at that time was considered the bravest of her playfellows—­had never forgotten it.

Now she felt as though something similar had befallen her.

She had seen the props on which she might depend removed from under her feet.  If her father and Wolf left her, she would look in vain for counsel and support.

That her lover was the most powerful sovereign on earth, and she could appeal to him if she needed help, did not enter her mind.  Nay, a vague foreboding told her that he and what was associated with him formed the power against which she must struggle.

The sham affection of the aristocratic lady who was to be her chaperon; the Queen, who last evening had catechised her as if she were a child, and whom she distrusted; the servile flatterer, Malfalconnet, in whose mirthful manner that day for the first time she thought she had detected dislike and slight sarcasm; the imperial love messenger, Don Luis Quijada, who with icy, dutiful coldness scarcely vouchsafed a word to her; and, lastly, the confessor Pedro de Soto, who treated her like a person who needed pity, and probably only awaited a fitting time to hurl an anathema into her face—­passed before her memory, and in all these persons, so far above her in birth and rank, she believed that she saw foes.

But how was it with the man who could trample them all in the dust like worms—­with her imperial lover?