ould.
He had foreseen everything except that Dolores had been in the next
room, for his secret spies had informed him through Perez that her
father had kept her a prisoner during the early part of the evening and
until after supper.

"When you were both gone," Dolores continued, holding him under her
terrible eyes, "I came in, and I found him dead, with the wound in his
left breast, and he was unarmed, murdered without a chance for his life.
There is blood upon my dress where it touched his--the blood of the man
I loved, shed by you. Ah, he was right to call you coward, and he died
for me, because you said things of me that no loving man would bear. He
was right to call you coward--it was well said--it was the last word he
spoke, and I shall not forget it. He had borne everything you heaped
upon himself, your insults, your scorn of his mother, but he would not
let you cast a slur upon my name, and if you had not killed him out of
sheer cowardice, he would have struck you in the face. He was a man! And
then my father took the blame to save you from the monstrous accusation,
and that all might believe him guilty he told the lie that saved you
before them all. Do I know the truth? Is one word of that not true?"

She had quite risen now and stood before him like an accusing angel. And
he, who was seldom taken unawares, and was very hard to hurt, leaned
back and suffered, slowly turning his head from side to side against the
back of the high carved chair.

"Confess that it is true!" she cried, in concentrated tones. "Can you
not even find courage for that? You are not the King now, you are your
brother's murderer, and the murderer of the man I loved, whose wife I
should have been to-morrow. Look at me, and confess that I have told the
truth. I am a Spanish woman, and I would not see my country branded
before the world with the shame of your royal murders, and if you will
confess and save my father, I will keep your secret for my country's
sake. But if not--then you must either kill me here, as you slew him, or
by the God that made you and the mother that bore you, I will tell all
Spain what you are, and the men who loved Don John of Austria shall rise
and take your blood for his blood, though it be blood royal, and you
shall die, as you killed, like the coward you are!"

The King's eyes were closed, and still his great pale head moved slowly
from side to side; for he was suffering, and the torture of mind he had
made Men