l of my trust.

Not in all Spain was there a more miserable man than I. All night I sat
in the room where I was wont to work, and to my wife's entreaties that
I should take some rest I answered that the affairs of Spain compelled
attention. And when morning found me haggard and distraught came a
courier from Philip with a letter.

"I have letters from Don John," he wrote, "more insistent than ever in
their tone. He demands the instant dispatch of money and Escovedo. I
have been thinking, and this letter confirms my every fear. I have cause
to apprehend some stroke that may disturb the public peace and ruin
Don John himself if he is allowed to retain Escovedo any longer in his
service. I am writing to Don John that I will see to it that Escovedo is
promptly dispatched as he requests. Do you see him dispatched, then,
in precise accordance with his deserts, and this at once, before the
villain kills us."

My skin bristled as I read. Here was fatality itself at work. Philip was
at his old fears--and, Heaven knows, he was not without justification of
his intuitions, as I had learnt by now--that Escovedo meditated the most
desperate measures. He was urging me again, as he had urged me before,
and more than once, to dispatch this traitor whose restless existence so
perpetually perturbed him. I was not deceived as to the meaning he set
upon that word "dispatch." I knew quite well the nature of the dispatch
he bade me contrive.

Conceive now my temptation. Escovedo dead, I should be safe, and Anne
would be safe, and this without any such betrayal as was being forced
upon me. And that death the King himself commanded a secret, royal
execution, such as his confessor Frey Diego de Chaves has since defended
as an expedient measure within the royal prerogative. He had commanded
it before quite unequivocally, but always I had stood between Escovedo
and the sword. Was I to continue in that attitude? Could it humanly be
expected of me in all the circumstances again to seek to deflect the
royal wrath from that too daring head? I was, after all, only a man,
subject to the temptations of the flesh, and there was a woman whom I
loved better than my own salvation to whose peace and happiness that
fellow Escovedo was become a menace.

If he lived, and for as long as he lived, she and I were to be as slaves
of his will, and I was to drag my honour and my loyalty through the foul
kennels of his disordered ambitions. And the King my master