to probe deeply. To my undoing, she probed
too deeply in one matter. It concerned some land--a little property--at
Velez. She had been attached to the place, it seemed, and she missed all
mention of it from the papers that I brought her. She asked the reason.

"It is disposed of," I told her.

"Disposed of!" quoth she. "But by whom?"

"By the Prince, your husband, a little while before he died."

She looked up at me--she was seated at the wide, carved writing-table,
I standing by her side--as if expecting me to say more. As I left my
utterance there, she frowned perplexedly.

"But what mystery is this?" she asked me. "To whom has it gone?"

"To one Sancho Gordo."

"To Sancho Gordo?" The frown deepened. "The washerwoman's son? You will
not tell me that he bought it?"

"I do not tell you so, madame. It was a gift from the Prince, your
husband."

"A gift!" She laughed. "To Sancho Gordo! So the washerwoman's child is
Eboli's son!"

And again she laughed on a note of deep contempt.

"Madame!" I cried, appalled and full of pity, "I assure you that you
assume too much. The Prince--"

"Let be," she interrupted me. "Do you dream I care what rivals I may
have had, however lowly they may have been? The Prince, my husband, is
dead, and that is very well. He is much better dead, Don Antonio. The
pity of it is that he ever lived, or else that I was born a woman."

She was staring straight before her, her hands fallen to her lap, her
face set as if carved and lifeless, and her voice came hard as the sound
of one stone beating upon another.

"Do you dream what it can mean to have been so nurtured on indignities
that there is no anger left, no pride to wound by the discovery of yet
another nothing but cold, cold hate? That, Don Antonio, is my case. You
do not know what my life has been. That man--"

"He is dead, madame," I reminded her, out of pity.

"And damned, I hope," she answered me in that same cold, emotionless
voice. "He deserves no less for all the wrongs he did to me, the least
of which was the great wrong of marrying me. For advancement he acquired
me; for his advancement he bartered and used me and made of me a thing
of shame."

I was so overwhelmed with grief and love and pity that a groan escaped
me almost before I was aware of it. She broke off short, and stared at
me in haughtiness.

"You presume to pity me, I think," she reproved me. "It is my own
fault. I was wrong to talk. Women should suffer si