How sweet it was!  Yet while he confessed this a painful emotion blended with the pleasure.

He had again thought of Barbara, of her first kiss and the other joys of the fairest May-time of his life, and the anxious fear stole upon him that he might give sin a power over his soul which, after undergoing a heavy penance, he thought he had broken.

Nothing, nothing at all, he now said to himself, ought to bind him to the woman whom he had effaced from the book of his life as unworthy, rebellious, lost to salvation; and, in a totally different mood, he again gazed at the child.  It already wore the semblance of an angel in the gracious Virgin’s train, and it should be dedicated to her and her divine Son.

Then the boy drew his little arm from under his head.

How strong he was! how superbly the chest of this child not yet four years old already arched!  This bud, when it had bloomed to manhood, might prove itself, as he himself had done in his youth, the stronger among the strong.  He carefully examined the harmoniously developed little muscles.  What a knight this child promised to become!  Surely it was hardly created for quiet prayer and the inactive peace of the cloister!  He was still free to dispose of the boy.  If he should intrust his physical development to the reliable Quijada, skilled in every knightly art, and to Count Lanoi, famed as a rider and judge of horses; confide the training of his mind and soul to the Bishop of Arras, the learned Frieslander Viglius, or any other clever, strictly religious man, he might become a second Roland and Bayard—­nay, if a crown fell to his lot, he might rival his great-grandfather, the Emperor Max, and—­in many a line he, too, had done things worthy of imitation—­him, his father.  The possession of this child would fill his darkened life with sunshine, his heart, paralyzed by grief and disappointment, with fresh pleasure in existence throughout the brief remainder of his earthly pilgrimage.  If he, the father, acknowledged him and aided him to become a happy, perhaps a great man, this lovely creature might some day be a brilliant star in the firmament of his age.

Here he paused.  The question, “For how long?” forced itself upon him.  He, too, during the short span of youth had been a hero and a victorious knight.  With secure confidence he had undertaken to establish for himself and his family a sovereignty of the world which should include the state and the Church.  “More, farther,” had been his motto, and to what stupendous successes it had led him!  Three years before he had routed at Muhlberg his most powerful rivals.  As prisoners they still felt his avenging hand.

And now?  At this hour?