ture now, so that she shrank
under it as under a bodily blow; and her grasp tightened violently upon
her sister's arm, rousing the half-fainting girl again to the full
consciousness of pain.

It was no wonder that Mendoza should have done such a deed, since he had
believed her ruined and lost to honour beyond salvation. That explained
all. He had guessed that she had been long with Don John, who had locked
her hastily into the inner room to hide her from the King. Had the King
been Don John, had she loved Philip as she loved his brother, her father
would have killed his sovereign as unhesitatingly, and would have
suffered any death without flinching. She believed that, and there was
enough of his nature in herself to understand it.

She was as innocent as the blind girl who lay in her arms, but suddenly
it flashed upon her that no one would believe it, since her own father
would not, and that her maiden honour and good name were gone for ever,
gone with her dead lover, who alone could have cleared her before the
world. She cared little for the court now, but she cared tenfold more
earnestly for her father's thought of her, and she knew him and the
terrible tenacity of his conviction when he believed himself to be
right. He had proved that by what he had done. Since she understood all,
she no longer doubted that he had killed Don John with the fullest
intention, to avenge her, and almost knowing that she was within
hearing, as indeed she had been. He had taken a royal life in atonement
for her honour, but he was to give his own, and was to die a shameful
death on the scaffold, within a few hours, or, at the latest, within a
few days, for her sake.

Then she remembered how on that afternoon she had seen tears in his
eyes, and had heard the tremor in his voice when he had said that she
was everything to him, that she had been all his life since her mother
had died--he had proved that, too; and though he had killed the man she
loved, she shrank from herself again as she thought what he must have
suffered in her dishonour. For it was nothing else. There was neither
man nor woman nor girl in Spain who would believe her innocent against
such evidence. The world might have believed Don John, if he had lived,
because the world had loved him and trusted him, and could never have
heard falsehood in his voice; but it would not believe her though she
were dying, and though she should swear upon the most sacred and true
things. Th