n instant, and no one else, the world is ours, with
all it holds, in spite of men and women and Kings!"

"It is ours already," she cried happily. "But is this wise, love? Are
you not too quick?"

"Would you have me slow when you and your name and my honour are all at
stake on one quick throw? Can we play too quickly at such a game with
fate? There will be time, just time, no more. For when the news is
known, it will spread like fire. I wonder that no one comes yet."

He listened, and Inez' hearing was ten times more sensitive than his,
but there was no sound. For besides Dolores and Inez only the dwarf and
the Princess of Eboli knew that Don John was living; and the Princess
had imposed silence on the jester and was in no haste to tell the news
until she should decide who was to know it first and how her own
advantage could be secured. So there was time, and Adonis swung himself
along the dim corridor and up winding stairs that be knew, and roused
the little wizened priest who lived in the west tower all alone, and
whose duty it was to say a mass each morning for any prisoner who
chanced to be locked up there; and when there was no one in confinement
he said his mass for himself in the small chapel which was divided from
the prison only by a heavy iron grating. The jester sometimes visited
him in his lonely dwelling and shocked and delighted him with alternate
tales of the court's wickedness and with harmless jokes that made his
wizened cheeks pucker and wrinkle into unaccustomed smiles. And he had
some hopes of converting the poor jester to a pious life. So they were
friends. But when the old priest heard that Don John of Austria was
suddenly dying in his room and that there was no one to shrive him,--for
that was the tale Adonis told,--he trembled from head to foot like a
paralytic, and the buttons of his cassock became as drops of quicksilver
and slipped from his weak fingers everywhere except into the
buttonholes, so that the dwarf had to fasten them for him in a furious
hurry, and find his stole, and set his hat upon his head, and polish
away the tears of excitement from his cheeks with his own silk
handkerchief. Yet it was well done, though so quickly, and he had a kind
old face and was a good priest.

But when Adonis had almost carried him to Don John's door, and pushed
him into the room, and when he saw that the man he supposed to be dying
was standing upright, holding a most beautiful lady by the hand, he dr