But when the coffin was opened, and the cerements drawn aside, the progress of decay was found to have been so rapid, that the mild and lovely face of Isabella could no longer be recognized by the most trusted and most faithful of her servants. His conscience would not allow him to swear, that the mass of corruption thus disclosed was the remains of his royal mistress, but only that having watched day and night beside it, he felt convinced that it was the same form which he had seen wrapped in its shroud at Toledo. From that moment, in the twenty-ninth year of his prosperous life, he resolved to spend what remained to him of time in earnest preparation for eternity. A few years later, the death of his beautiful and excellent wife strengthened his purpose, and snapped the dearest tie which bound him to the world. Having completed the Jesuits' college at Gandia, their first establishment of that kind in Europe, and having married his son and his two daughters, he put his affairs in order and retired into the young and still struggling society of Ignatius Loyola. In the year 1548, the thirty-eighth of his age, he ceased to be duke of Gandia, and became father Francis of the Company of Jesus. Borja did not appear at Yuste as a chance or uninvited guest. Charles seems to have regarded him with an affection as strong as his cold nature was capable of entertaining. It was with no ordinary interest that he watched the career of the man whom alone he had chosen to make the confidant of his intended abdication, and who had unexpectedly forestalled him in the execution of the scheme. They were now in circumstances in some respects similar, in others widely different. Both had voluntarily descended from the eminence of their hereditary fortunes. Broken in health and spirits, the emperor had come to Yuste to rest and to die. The duke, on the other hand, in the full vigor of his age, had entered the humblest of the religious orders, to work out his salvation in a course of self-denial and toil, ending only in the grave. His career in the Company began with severe theological study, from which he passed to the pulpit and the professor's chair. As provincial of Aragon and Andalusia, he had been for some time laboring as a preacher, and teacher in various cities of Spain; he had founded colleges at Plasencia and Seville; and he was now delivering lectures at Alcala, in the college which Jesuit energy soon raised to be the stately pile which still forms one of the most prominent ruins of that Palmyra of universities.