in blood that he might wash it clean
of the heresy of thinking differently from himself in spiritual matters,
and he would have done the same by England but that God--Who cannot,
after all, be quite of Philip's way of thinking--willed otherwise. All
this he has done for the greater honour and glory of his Maker, but he
will not tolerate his Maker's interference with his own minor pleasures
of the flesh. He is, as you would say, a Spaniard of Spain.

This satyr's protruding eyes fell upon the lovely Princess of Eboli--for
lovely she was, a very pearl among women. I spare you details. Eboli was
most loyal and submissive where his King was concerned, most complacent
and accommodating. That was but logical, and need not shock you at all.
To advance his worldly ambitions had he taken Anne to wife; why should
he scruple, then, to yield her again that thus he might advance those
ambitions further?

If poor Anne argued at all, she must have argued thus. For the rest,
she was told that to be loved by the King was an overwhelming honour,
a matter for nightly prayers of thankfulness. Philip was something very
exalted, hardly human in fact; almost, if not quite, divine. Who and
what was Anne that she should dispute with those who knew the world, and
who placed these facts before her? Never in all her little life had she
belonged to herself. Always had she been the property of somebody else,
to be dealt with as her owner might consider best. If about the Court
she saw some men more nearly of her own age--though there were not many,
for Philip's Court was ever a gloomy, sparsely peopled place--she took
it for granted that such men were not for her. This until I taught her
otherwise, which, however, was not yet a while. Had I been at Court in
those days, I think I should have found the means, at whatever cost, of
preventing that infamy; for I know that I loved her from the day I saw
her. But I was of no more than her own age, and I had not yet been drawn
into that whirlpool.

So she went to the arms of that rachitic prince, and she bore him a
son--for, as all the world knows, the Duke of Prastana owns Philip for
his father. And Eboli increased in power and prosperity and the favour
of his master, and also, no doubt, in the contempt of posterity. There
are times when the thought of posterity and its vengeances is of great
solace.

It would be some six years later when first I came to Court, brought
thither by my father, to enter t