pon the favoured province.

The Demon of the South wanted money. Moreover, he wanted his land
cleansed of heresy. Rich men in Roussillon were heretics or the children
of heretics. Philip was fighting the Church's quarrel abroad in all
lands, on all waters--against Elizabeth of England, against the bold
burghers of the Low Countries, the Protestant princes of Germany,
against the Bearnais, and (but this secretly) against the King of
France.

Far away where the hills of the Gaudarrama look down upon Madrid, and
where in the cold wind-drift from their snows the life of a man goes out
while the flame of a candle burns steadily, sat a little wizened figure,
bent and seared, spinning spiders' webs in a wilderness of stone, in the
midst of a desert wherein no man dwelt. He spun them to an accompaniment
of monks' chanting and the tolling of bells, but every hour horsemen
went and came at full gallop across the wild.

The palace in the wilderness was the Escurial, and the man Philip II. of
Spain, known all over Europe by the terrible name of "The Demon of the
South."

For him there was no truce in this war. He moved slowly, as he himself
boasted, with a foot of lead, but hitherto surely. Of his own land he
was absolutely secure, save perhaps in that far corner of ever-turbulent
Catalonia which is called Roussillon.

The inhabitants considered that province almost a part of France. The
Demon of the South, however, thought otherwise--that little man at the
desk whose was the League, who moved Guise and all the rest as concealed
clockwork moves the puppets when the great Strasburg horologe strikes
twelve--whose was the Armada and the army of Parma, camped out on the
Flemish dunes. He held that Roussillon was for him a kind of gold mine.
And his black tax-gatherers were the familiars of the Holy Office, that
mystery of mysteries, the Inquisition itself.

Nevertheless, for the moment, there was peace--peace on Collioure, peace
on the towered feudalism of the castle thereof, peace on the alternate
fish-tailed sapphire and turquoise of its sleeping sea, and most of all
peace on La Masane, over against the high-perched fortress of St. Elne.

The Senora's two maidens served the evening meal in the wide,
seaward-looking room, the windows of which opened like doors upon the
covered terrace. Though the spring was not yet far advanced the air was
already sweet and scented with juniper and romarin, lavender, myrtle,
and lentisque--gro