ly. Cruel-minded courtiers
suspected Isabella Angelica, but she was so obviously crushed that their
suspicions were allayed. Her heart exulted--she had killed him with a
poisoned pen-wiper. No one knew. Poor Isabella Angelica! Her tragic love
affair had indeed transformed her from the appealing girl of yesterday
to the recklessly unhappy woman of to-day, forced on to the path of
cruelty and vice by unlooked-for circumstances. She performed this deed
and that with almost mechanical diabolicism; some say she knew not one
day from another. In 1597 she was offered an exceedingly good position
by the Inquisition, which she immediately accepted. It was, she felt,
her only chance of happiness--to have the opportunity of inventing a few
good tortures would comfort her; and why not? People of to-day, narrow
and unsympathetic, may censure her as being spiteful and unkind, but in
those days things were--oh, so different!

She sent for her little brother and had him burnt; this eased the pain
at her heart a little. Then her aunt was conveyed to her from Majorca,
and on arrival was pierced by several bodkins and ultimately buried in
hot tar. Isabella Angelica almost gave vent to a wan smile.

She supervised her father's death, the actual work being performed by
her colleagues of the Inquisition. He was cut in moderate-sized snippets
and toasted on one side only.

It says much for Isabella Angelica's charm and personality that the
populace, in spite of their knowledge of her deeds, one and all adored
her--to the end of her life the unstinting love and adulation of all who
came in contact with her was hers irretrievably.

It was during the personal mutilation of her third cousin that she
caught the influenza cold which cost her her life. Poor, doomed Isabella
Angelica: her death-bed was surrounded by heart-broken mourners who had
flocked from all parts of sunny Spain to pay tribute to the dying
beauty; the Inquisition issued an edict that no eyes were to be put out
for a whole week in honour of her.

She died peacefully, clasping an ivory rosary and a faded miniature on
elephant's hide, portraying a handsome, debonair young man. Could it
have been Enrique Baloona?

Thus lived and died one of Spain's most entrancing specimens of feminine
beauty.

MAGGIE McWHISTLE

Born in an obscure Scotch manse of Jacobite parents, Maggie McWhistle
goes down to immortality as perhaps the greatest heroine of Scottish
history; and perh