the friar had been the most active of all his coadjutators. In those
days Frey Miguel, who was the Provincial of his order, a man widely
renowned for his learning and experience of affairs, who had been
preacher to Don Sebastian and confessor to Don Antonio, had wielded a
vast influence in Portugal. That influence he had unstintingly exerted
on behalf of the Pretender, to whom he was profoundly devoted. After Don
Antonio's army had been defeated on land by the Duke of Alba, and his
fleet shattered in the Azores in 1582 by the Marquis of Santa Cruz,
Frey Miguel found himself deeply compromised by his active share in the
rebellion. He was arrested and suffered a long imprisonment in Spain. In
the end, because he expressed repentance, and because Philip II.,
aware of the man's gifts and worth, desired to attach him to himself by
gratitude, he was enlarged, and appointed Vicar of Santa Maria la Real,
where he was now become confessor, counsellor and confidant of the
Princess Anne of Austria.

But his gratitude to King Philip was not of a kind to change his
nature, to extinguish his devotion to the Pretender, Don Antonio--who,
restlessly ambitious, continued ceaselessly to plot abroad--or yet to
abate the fervour of his patriotism. The dream of his life was ever
the independence of Portugal, with a native prince upon the throne.
And because of Anne's fervent hope, a hope that grew almost daily into
conviction, that Sebastian had survived and would return one day to
claim his kingdom, those two at Madrigal, in that quiet eddy of the
great stream of life, were drawn more closely to each other.

But as the years passed, and Anne's prayers remained unanswered and the
deliverer did not come, her hopes began to fade again. Gradually she
reverted to her earlier frame of mind in which all hopes were set upon a
reunion with the unknown beloved in the world to come.

One evening in the spring of 1594--four years after the name of
Sebastian had first passed between the priest and the princess--Frey
Miguel was walking down the main street of Madrigal, a village whose
every inhabitant was known to him, when he came suddenly face to face
with a stranger. A stranger would in any case have drawn his attention,
but there was about this man something familiar to the friar, something
that stirred in him vague memories of things long forgotten. His garb of
shabby black was that of a common townsman, but there was something in
his air and gla