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