by her dread uncle's
will was to be her living tomb, above whose gates her spirit may have
beheld the inscription, "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate!" she
made her protest, called upon the bishop who accompanied her to bear
witness that she did not go of her own free will.

But what she willed was a matter of no account. King Philip's was,
under God's, the only will in Spain. Still, less perhaps to soften the
sacrifice imposed upon her than because of what he accounted due to one
of his own blood, his Catholic Majesty accorded her certain privileges
unusual to members of religious communities: he granted her a little
civil list--two ladies-in-waiting and two grooms--and conferred upon her
the title of Excellency, which she still retained even when after her
hurried novitiate of a single year she had taken the veil. She submitted
where to have striven would have been to have spent herself in vain;
but her resignation was only of the body, and this dejected body moved
mechanically through the tasks and recreations that go to make up the
grey monotone of conventual existence; in which one day is as another
day, one hour as another hour; in which the seasons of the year
lose their significance; in which time has no purpose save for its
subdivision into periods devoted to sleeping and waking, to eating and
fasting, to praying and contemplating, until life loses all purpose and
object, and sterilizes itself into preparation for death.

Though they might command and compel her body, her spirit remained
unfettered in rebellion. Anon the claustral apathy might encompass her;
in time and by slow degrees she might become absorbed into the grey
spirit of the place. But that time was not yet. For the present she must
nourish her caged and starving soul with memories of glimpses caught in
passing of the bright, active, stirring world without; and where memory
stopped she had now beside her a companion to regale her with tales of
high adventure and romantic deeds and knightly feats, which served but
to feed and swell her yearnings.

This companion, Frey Miguel de Souza, was a Portuguese friar of the
order of St. Augustine, a learned, courtly man who had moved in the
great world and spoke with the authority of an eye-witness. And above
all he loved to talk of that last romantic King of Portugal, with
whom he had been intimate, that high-spirited, headstrong, gallant,
fair-haired lad Sebastian, who at the age of four-and-twenty