tering traitors
under his roof-tree.

"Hush!" he whispered. "Enough--now you have carried the jest far enough.
It was excellent with the springald D'Albret. You played him well, like
a trout on an angle. But after all we are--where we are. And Teruel and
Tullio are not the men to appreciate such a jest."

"I was never farther from jesting in my life," said Valentine la Nina;
"I love him as I never thought to love man before. If he would have
loved me, and forgotten that--that woman--I would have done for him all
I said--aye, and more!"

"You--Valentine--a king's daughter?"

"Great good that has done me," cried the girl; "I must not show my face.
My father (if, indeed, he is my father) would so gladly get rid of me
that he would present me to the Grand Turk if he thought the secret
would hold water. As it is, he keeps me doing hateful work, lying and
smiling, smiling and lying, like--like a Jesuit!"

"Girl, you have taken leave of your senses--of your judgment!" said her
"uncle" severely. "Do you not see that you are sealing the doom of the
man for whom you profess a feeling as foolish as sudden?"

"Neither foolish nor sudden," retorted the girl sullenly, her hand on
the back of a chair, gripping the top bar like a weapon. For a moment
the little soft man with his eternal smile might have been her victim.
She could have brained him with a blow--the angle of that solid oaken
seat crashing down upon the shining bald head which harboured so many
secrets and had worked out so many plots. Valentine la Nina let the
moment pass, but while it lasted she might very well have done it.

"It is not foolish," she said, relaxing her grip for an instant. "I am a
human creature with a heart that beats so many times a minute, and a
skin that covers the same human needs and passions--just as if I were a
free and happy girl--like--like that spy's daughter whom he loves.
Neither is it sudden. For I saw him more than once on the hills above
Collioure, when we stayed in the house of that cruel young monster
Raphael Llorient. I wandered on the wastes covered with romarin and
thyme--why, think you? 'A new-born passion for nature,' you said,
laughing. 'To get away from our host, Don Raphael,' said Livia the
countess. Neither, good people! It was, because, stretched at length on
a bed of juniper and lavender, in the shadow of a rock, my eyes had seen
the noblest youth the gods had put upon the earth. He was asleep."

"You are mad, girl,"