y falseness the
instrument of her father's ruin.

For herself, when all was over, she sought the refuge of a convent. But
she quitted it without professing. The past gave her no peace, and she
returned to the world to seek in excesses an oblivion which the cloister
denied her and only death could give. In her will she disposed that her
skull should be placed over the doorway of the house in the Calle de
Ataud, as a measure of posthumous atonement for her sins. And there the
fleshless, grinning skull of that once lovely head abode for close upon
four hundred years. It was still to be seen there when Buonaparte's
legions demolished the Holy Office of the Inquisition.

IV. THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL

The Story of the False Sebastian of Portugal

There is not in all that bitter tragi-comic record of human frailty
which we call History a sadder story than this of the Princess Anne, the
natural daughter of the splendid Don John of Austria, natural son of the
Emperor Charles V. and, so, half-brother to the bowelless King Philip
II. of Spain. Never was woman born to royal or semi-royal state who was
more utterly the victim of the circumstances of her birth.

Of the natural sons of princes something could be made, as witness the
dazzling career of Anne's own father; but for natural daughters--and
especially for one who, like herself, bore a double load of
cadency--there was little use or hope. Their royal blood set them in a
class apart; their bastardy denied them the worldly advantages of that
spurious eminence. Their royal blood prescribed that they must mate with
princes; their bastardy raised obstacles to their doing so. Therefore,
since the world would seem to hold no worthy place for them, it
was expedient to withdraw them from the world before its vanities
beglamoured them, and to immure them in convents, where they might
aspire with confidence to the sterile dignity of abbesshood.

Thus it befell with Anne. At the early age of six she had been sent to
the Benedictine convent at Burgos, and in adolescence removed thence
to the Monastery of Santa Maria la Real at Madrigal, where it was
foreordained that she should take the veil. She went unwillingly. She
had youth, and youth's hunger of life, and not even the repressive
conditions in which she had been reared had succeeded in extinguishing
her high spirit or in concealing from her the fact that she was
beautiful. On the threshold of that convent which