e news in more measured, careful terms, exerting all
the magnetism of his will to sustain her reeling senses. Gradually she
quelled the storm of her emotions.

"And you say that you have seen him? Oh!" Once more the colour suffused
her cheeks, and her eyes glowed, her expression became radiant. "Where
is he?"

"Here. Here in Madrigal."

"In Madrigal?" She was all amazement. "But why in Madrigal?"

"He was in Valladolid, and there heard that I--his sometime preacher and
counsellor--was Vicar here at Santa Maria la Real. He came to seek me.
He comes disguised, under the false name of Gabriel de Espinosa,
and setting up as a pastry-cook until his term of penance shall be
completed, and he shall be free to disclose himself once more to his
impatiently awaiting people."

It was bewildering, intoxicating news to her. It set her mind in
turmoil, made of her soul a battle-ground for mad hope and dreadful
fear. This dream-prince, who for four years had been the constant
companion of her thoughts, whom her exalted, ardent, imaginative,
starved Soul had come to love with a consuming passion, was a living
reality near at hand, to be seen in the flesh by the eyes of her body.
It was a thought that set her in an ecstasy of terror, so that she dared
not ask Frey Miguel to bring Don Sebastian to her. But she plied him
with questions, and so elicited from him a very circumstantial story.

Sebastian, after his defeat and escape, had made a vow upon the Holy
Sepulchre to lay aside the royal dignity of which he deemed that he
had proved himself unworthy, and to do penance for the pride that had
brought him down, by roaming the world in humble guise, earning his
bread by the labour of his hands and the sweat of his brow like any
common hind, until he should have purged his offense and rendered
himself worthy once more to resume the estate to which he had been born.

It was a tale that moved her pity to the point of tears. It exalted her
hero even beyond the eminence he had already held in her fond dreams,
particularly when to that general outline were added in the days that
followed details of the wanderings and sufferings of the Hidden Prince.
At last, some few weeks after that first startling announcement of his
presence, in the early days of August of that year 1594, Frey Miguel
proposed to her the thing she most desired, yet dared not beg.

"I have told His Majesty of your attachment to his memory in all these
years in which we