these women who persecute you with their writing? And why
do they write to you? Do they want you to help them?"

"Not exactly that;" he was still smiling. "I ought not to laugh, I
suppose. They are ladies of the court sometimes, and sometimes others,
and I--I fancy that they want me to--how shall I say?--to begin by
writing them letters of the same sort."

"What sort of letters?"

"Why--love letters," answered Don John, driven to extremity in spite of
his resistance.

"Love letters!" cried Dolores, understanding at last. "Do you mean to
say that there are women whom you do not know, who tell you that they
love you before you have ever spoken to them? Do you mean that a lady of
the court, whom you have probably never even seen, wrote that note and
tied it up with flowers and risked everything to bring it here, just in
the hope that you might notice her? It is horrible! It is vile! It is
shameless! It is beneath anything!"

"You say she was a lady--you saw her. I did not. But that is what she
did, whoever she may be."

"And there are women like that--here, in the palace! How little I know!"

"And the less you learn about the world, the better," answered the young
soldier shortly.

"But you have never answered one, have you?" asked Dolores, with a scorn
that showed how sure she was of his reply.

"No." He spoke thoughtfully. "I once thought of answering one. I meant
to tell her that she was out of her senses, but I changed my mind. That
was long ago, before I knew you--when I was eighteen."

"Ever since you were a boy!"

The look of wonder was not quite gone from her face yet, but she was
beginning to understand more clearly, though still very far from
distinctly. It did not occur to her once that such things could be
temptations to the brilliant young leader whom every woman admired and
every man flattered, and that only his devoted love for her had kept him
out of ignoble adventures since he had grown to be a man. Had she seen
that, she would have loved him even better, if it were possible. It was
all, as she had said, shameless and abominable. She had thought that she
knew much of evil, and she had even told him so that evening, but this
was far beyond anything she had dreamt of in her innocent thoughts, and
she instinctively felt that there were lower depths of degradation to
which a woman could fall, and of which she would not try to guess the
vileness and horror.

"Shall I burn the flowers, too?" asked