inflicted new wounds upon it. How he, toward whom the whole world
looked, and whose sensitive soul endured with so much difficulty the
slightest transgression of his will and his inclination, would recover
from the destruction of the most earnest, nay, the most sacred
aspirations of a whole life, was utterly incomprehensible to her. To
restore the unity of religion had been as warm a desire of his heart as
the cultivation of singing had been cherished by hers, and the treaty of
Passau ceded to the millions of German Protestants the right to remain
separated from the Catholic Church. This must utterly cloud, darken,
poison his already joyless existence. Spite of the wrong he had done
her, how gladly, had she not been lost to art, she would now have tried
upon him its elevating, consoling power!

From her old confessor, her husband, and others she learned that Charles
scarcely paid any further heed to the political affairs of the German
nation, which had once been so important to him; and with intense
indignation she heard the fellow-countrymen whom her husband brought to
the house declare that, in her German native land, Charles was now as
bitterly hated as he had formerly been loved and reverenced.

The imperial crown would lapse to his brother; Ferdinand's son,
Maximilian, now Charles's son-in-law, was destined to succeed his father,
while the Infant Philip must in future be content with the sovereignty of
Spain, the Netherlands, Charles's Italian possessions, and the New World.

For years Barbara had believed that she hated him, but now, when the
bitterest envy could have desired nothing more cruel, with all the warmth
of her passionate heart she made his suffering her own, and it filled her
with shame and resentment against herself that she, too, had more than
once desired to see her own downfall revenged on him.