“And if his Majesty decides otherwise?”

“Then, of course—­” answered Granvelle, shrugging his shoulders.  “But the draught must be composed, and there are more important matters for us to discuss.”

As he spoke he rang the bell on the table at his side, and Hannibal obeyed his master’s summons.  In doing so he passed Barbara, who started as if bewildered when she heard him approach.

He went up to her in great surprise, but ere he could utter the first words she clutched his arm, whispering:  “I am going, Hannibal.  His Eminence did not entirely forget me.  If he can receive me, send word to my house.”

Scarcely able to control herself, Barbara set out on her way home.  The words she had heard had shaken the depths of her soul like an earthquake.

The news that Charles intended to confine in a monastery the boy whom she had given up to him that he might bestow upon him whatever lay within his imperial power poisoned her joy in the future.  How often this man lead inflicted bleeding wounds upon her heart!  Now he trampled it under his cruel feet.  Two convictions had lent her the strength not to despair:  she felt sure that his love for her could never have been extinguished had the power of her art aided her to warm Charles’s heart, and she was still more positive that the father would raise to splendour and magnificence the boy whom she had given him.

And now?

He had refused the leech’s request to help her regain the divine gift to which, according to his own confession, he owed the purest joys; and her strong, merry child he, its own father, condemned to disappear and wither in the imprisonment of a cloister.  This must not be, and on her way home she formed plan after plan to prevent it.

Pyramus attributed her sometimes depressed, sometimes irritable manner to the disappointment of her wish.

What she had just learned and had had inflicted upon her filled her with hatred of life.

Her two boys scarcely dared to approach their mother, who, unlike her usual self, harshly rebuffed them.

At twilight Hannibal Melas appeared, full of joyous excitement.  Granvelle sent Barbara word that the doorkeeper Mangin would show her a good seat.  His Eminence desired to be remembered to her, and said that only those who had been closely associated with his Majesty would be admitted to this ceremony, and he knew that she ranked among the first of these.

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.