most empty, and we shall find her in the
little gallery above the Queen's garden."

The next morning we went there, Don Enrique de Cerda and his squire,
Juan Lepe. The palace rose great and goodly enough, with the church at
hand. All had been built as by magic, silken pavilions flying away and
stout houses settling themselves down. Sunk among the walls had been
managed a small garden for the Queen and her ladies. A narrow, latticed
and roofed gallery built without the Queen's rooms looked down upon
orange and myrtle trees and a fountain. Here we found the Marchioness de
Moya, with her two waiting damsels whom she set by the gallery door. Don
Enrique kissed her hand and then motioned to me. Don Jayme de Marchena
made his reverence.

She was a strong woman who would go directly to the heart of things.
Always she would learn from the man himself. She asked me this and I
answered; that and the other and I answered. "Don Pedro--?" I told the
enmity there and the reason for it. "The Jewish rabbi, my great-grand
father?" I avowed it, but by three Castilian and Christian
great-grandfathers could not be counted as Jew! Practise Judaism? No. My
grandmother Judith had been Christian.

She drove to the heart of it. "You yourself are Christian. What do you
mean by that? What the Queen means? What the Grand Cardinal and the
Archbishop of Granada means? What the Holy Office means?"

I kept silence for a moment, then I told her as well as I might, without
fever and without melancholy, what I had written and of the Dominican.

"You have been," she said, "an imprudent cavalier."

The fountain flashed below us, a gray dove flew over garden. I said,
"There is a text, 'With all thy getting, get understanding.' There
is another, 'For God so loved the world'--that He wished to impart
understanding."

She sat quiet, seeming to listen to the fountain. Then she said, "Are
you ready to avow when they ask you that in every particular to which
the Grand Inquisitor may point you are wrong, and that all that Holy
Church through mouth of Holy Office says is right?"

I said, "No, Madam! Present Church is not as large as Truth, nor as fair
as Beauty."

"You may think that, but will you say the other?"

"Say that church or kingdom exactly matches Truth and Beauty?"

"That is what I am sure you will have to say."

"Then, no!"

"I do not see," she said, "that I can do anything for you."

There was a chair beside her. She sat down, her chin