he service of the Prince of Eboli as one
of his secretaries. As I have told you, I loved the Princess from the
moment I beheld her. From the gossip of the Court I pieced together
her story, and pitied her, and, pitying her, I loved her the more. Her
beauty dazzled me, her charm enmeshed me, and she had grown by now in
worldly wisdom and mental attainments. Yet I set a mask upon my passion,
and walked very circumspectly, for all that by nature I was as reckless
and profligate as all the world could ever call me. She was the wife of
the puissant Secretary of State, the mistress of the King. Who was I to
dispute their property to those exalted ones?

And another consideration stayed me. She seemed to love the King. Young
and lacking in wisdom, this amazed me. In age he compared favourably
with her husband he was but thirteen years older than herself--but in
nothing else. He was a weedy, unhealthy-looking man, weakly of frame,
rachitic, undersized, with spindle-shanks, and a countenance that was
almost grotesque, with its protruding jaw, gaping mouth, great, doglike
eyes, and yellow tuft of beard. A great king, perhaps, this Philip,
having so been born; but a ridiculous man and an unspeakable lover. And
yet this incomparable woman seemed to love him.

Let me pass on. For ten years I nursed that love of mine in secret.
I was helped, perhaps, by the fact that in the mean time I had
married--oh, just as Eboli himself had married, an arrangement dictated
by worldly considerations--and no better, truer mate did ever a man find
than I in Juana Coello. We had children and we were happy, and for a
season--for years, indeed--I began to think that my unspoken passion for
the Princess of Eboli was dead and done with. I saw her rarely now, and
my activities increased with increasing duties. At twenty-six I was one
of the Ministers of the Crown, and one of the chief supporters of
that party of which Eboli was the leader in Spanish politics. I sat
in Philip's Council, and I came under the spell of that taciturn,
suspicious man, who, utterly unlovable as he was, had yet an uncanny
power of inspiring devotion. From the spell of it I never quite escaped
until after long years of persecution. Yet the discovery that one by
nature so entirely antipathetic to me should have obtained such sway
over my mind helped me to understand Anne's attachment to him.

When Eboli died, in 1573, I had so advanced in ability and Royal favour
that I took his