from two pontiffs."

And he signed it--after the manner of the Kings of Portugal in all
ages--"El Rey"--the King.

"Will that content you, lady?" he pleaded, handing it to her.

"How shall this scrawl content me?"

"It is a bond I shall redeem as soon as Heaven will permit."

Thereafter she fell to weeping, and he to protesting, until Frey Miguel
urged him to depart, as it grew late. And then she forgot her own grief,
and became all solicitude for him, until naught would content her but
she must empty into his hands her little store of treasure--a hundred
ducats and such jewels as she possessed, including a gold watch set with
diamonds and a ring bearing a cameo portrait of King Philip, and last of
all a portrait of herself, of the size of a playing-card.

At last, as ten was striking, he was hurried away. Frey Miguel had gone
on his knees to him, and kissed his hand, what time he had passionately
urged him not to linger; and then Sebastian had done the same by the
Princess both weeping now. At last he was gone, and on the arm of Dona
Maria de Grado the forlorn Anne staggered back to her cell to weep and
pray.

In the days that followed she moved, pale and listless, oppressed by her
sense of loss and desolation, a desolation which at last she sought to
mitigate by writing to him to Valladolid, whither he had repaired. Of
all those letters only two survive.

"My king and lord," she wrote in one of these, "alas! How we suffer by
absence! I am so filled with the pain of it that if I did not seek
the relief of writing to your Majesty and thus spend some moments in
communion with you, there would be an end to me. What I feel to-day
is what I feel every day when I recall the happy moments sodeliciously
spent, which are no more. This privation is for me so severe a
punishment of heaven that I should call it unjust, for without cause I
find myself deprived of the happiness missed by me for so many years
and purchased at the price of suffering and tears. Ah, my lord,
how willingly, nevertheless, would I not suffer all over again the
misfortunes that have crushed me if thus I might spare your Majesty the
least of them. May He who rules the world grant my prayers and set a
term to so great an unhappiness, and to the intolerable torment I
suffer through being deprived of the presence of your Majesty. It were
impossible for long to suffer so much pain and live.

"I belong to you, my lord; you know it already. The troth I