to wait in prison, what time he went to ransack the fellow's house
in Madrigal.

Don Rodrigo was prompt in acting; yet even so his prisoner mysteriously
found means to send a warning that enabled Frey Miguel to forestall the
Alcalde. Before Don Rodrigo's arrival, the friar had abstracted
from Espinosa's house a box of papers which he reduced to ashes.
Unfortunately Espinosa had been careless. Four letters not confided
to the box were discovered by the alguaziles. Two of them were from
Anne--one of which supplies the extract I have given; the other two from
Frey Miguel himself.

Those letters startled Don Rodrigo de Santillan. He was a shrewd
reasoner and well-informed. He knew how the justice of Castile was kept
on the alert by the persistent plottings of the Portuguese Pretender,
Don Antonio, sometime Prior of Crato. He was intimate with the past
life of Frey Miguel, knew his self-sacrificing patriotism and passionate
devotion to the cause of Don Antonio, remembered the firm dignity of
his prisoner, and leapt at a justifiable conclusion. The man in his
hands--the man whom the Princess Anne addressed in such passionate terms
by the title of Majesty--was the Prior of Crato. He conceived that he
had stumbled here upon something grave and dangerous. He ordered the
arrest of Frey Miguel, and then proceeded to visit Dona Ana at the
convent. His methods were crafty, and depended upon the effect of
surprise. He opened the interview by holding up before her one of the
letters he had found, asking her if she acknowledged it for her own.

She stared a moment panic-stricken; then snatched it from his hands,
tore it across, and would have torn again, but that he caught her wrists
in a grip of iron to prevent her, with little regard in that moment for
the blood royal in her veins. King Philip was a stern master, pitiless
to blunderers, and Don Rodrigo knew he never would be forgiven did he
suffer that precious letter to be destroyed.

Overpowered in body and in spirit, she surrendered the fragments and
confessed the letter her own.

"What is the real name of this man, who calls himself a pastry-cook, and
to whom you write in such terms as these?" quoth the magistrate.

"He is Don Sebastian, King of Portugal." And to that declaration
she added briefly the story of his escape from Alcacer-el-Kebir and
subsequent penitential wanderings.

Don Rodrigo departed, not knowing what to think or believe, but
convinced that it was time