her old affection for the Emperor Charles was wholly dead; for when, in
November of the following year, agitated to the very depths of his being,
he brought her the tidings that the Emperor had been surprised and almost
captured at Innsbruck by Duke Maurice of Saxony, who owed him the
Elector's hat, and had only escaped the misfortune by a hurried flight to
Carinthia, he merely saw a smile, which he did not know how to interpret,
on her lips. But little as Barbara said about this event, her mind was
often occupied with it.

In the first place, it recalled to her memory the dance under the lindens
at Prebrunn.

Did it not seem as if her ardent royal partner of those days had become
her avenger?

Yet it grieved her that the man whose greatness and power it had grown a
necessity for her to admire had suffered so deep a humiliation and, as at
the time of the May festival under the Ratisbon lindens, the sympathy of
her heart belonged to him to whom she had apparently preferred the
treacherous Saxon duke.

The treaty of Passau, which soon followed his flight, was to impose upon
the monarch things scarcely less hard to bear; for it compelled him to
allow the Protestants in Germany the free exercise of their religion, and
to release his prisoners, the Elector John Frederick of Saxony and the
Landgrave Philip of Hesse.

Whatever befell the sovereign she brought into connection with herself.
Charles's motto had now become unattainable for him, as since her loss of
voice it had been for her. Her heart bled unseen, and his misfortune