Barbara lived rendered it easy to win her over to her husband's view of
this noble movement; besides, it was directed against the unhappy man
whom she would willingly have seen spared any fresh anxiety, and who had
proved thousands of times how much he preferred the Netherlands to any
other of his numerous kingdoms.

Hitherto Barbara had troubled herself very little about political
affairs, and her interest in them died completely when a visitor called
who threw them, as well as everything else, wholly into the shade.




CHAPTER XIII.

Wolf Hartschwert had come to Brussels and sought Barbara.

Her husband was attending to the duties of his office in the Rhine
country when she received her former lover. Had Pyramus been present,
he might perhaps have considered the knight a less dangerous opponent
than seven years before, for a great change had taken place in his outer
man. The boyish appearance which at that time still clung to him had
vanished and, by constant intercourse with the Castilian nobility, he had
acquired a manly, self-assured bearing perfectly in harmony with his age
and birth.

As he sat opposite to Barbara for the first time, she could not avert her
eyes from him and, with both his hands clasped in hers, she let him tell
her of his journey to Brussels and his efforts to find her in the great
city. Meanwhile she scarcely heeded the purport of his words; it was