e imprudence of which you speak? I have
heard it said that it was for love of a woman that you did it."

"You have heard that, too?" he said. He had paled a little. "You have
heard a deal, Marquise. I wonder would it amuse you to hear more, to
hear from my own lips this story of mine which all Europe garbles? Would
it?"

There was a faint note of anxiety in his voice, a look faintly anxious
in his eyes.

She scanned him a moment gravely, almost inscrutably. "What purpose
can it serve?" she asked; and her tone was forbidding--almost a tone of
fear.

"It will explain," he insisted.

"Explain what?"

"How it comes that I am not this moment prostrate at your feet; how it
happens that I am not on my knees to worship your heavenly beauty; how I
have contrived to remain insensible before a loveliness that in happier
times would have made me mad."

"Vive Dieu!" she murmured, half ironical. "Perhaps that needs
explaining."

"How it became necessary," he pursued, never heeding the interruption,
"that yesterday you should proclaim your disbelief that I could be, as
you said, a Spaniard of Spain. How it happens that Antonio Perez has
become incapable of any emotion but hate. Will you hear the story--all
of it?"

He was leaning towards her, his white face held close to her own, a
smouldering fire in the dark, sunken eyes that now devoured her.

She shivered, and her own cheeks turned very pale. Her lips were faintly
twisted as if in an effort to smile.

"My friend--if you insist," she consented.

"It is the purpose for which I came," he announced.

For a long moment each looked into the other's eyes with a singular
intentness that nothing here would seem to warrant.

At length she spoke.

"Come," she said, "you shall tell me."

And she waved him to a chair set in the embrasure of the mullioned
window that looked out over a tract of meadowland sweeping gently down
to the river.

Don Antonio sank into the chair, placing his hat and whip upon the floor
beside him. The Marquise faced him, occupying the padded window-seat,
her back to the light, her countenance in shadow.

And here, in his own words, follows the story that he told her as she
herself set it down soon after. Whilst more elaborate and intimate
in parts, it yet so closely agrees throughout with his own famous
"Relacion," that I do not hesitate to accept the assurance she has
left us that every word he uttered was burnt as if by an acid upon her
memo