The girl stood smiling upon the young man, a spray of the great scarlet blossom of the pomegranate freshly plucked and held easily in her hand. She had broken it from the tree in the courtyard as she came in. The flowers showed like handfuls of blood splashed upon the bosom and neck of her white clinging robe.

“You are very beautiful,” said the Abbe John, his voice no more than a hoarse gasp; “what are you doing here in this place? Tell me your name. I seem to have seen you long ago, in dreams. But I have forgotten I forget everything!”

Then, without taking her eyes, mystically amber and gold, softly caressing as the sea and as changeful, from the young man’s face, she beckoned him forward.

“We shall speak more at ease in another place,” she said. And held out her hand to him, carelessly, palm downwards, as if he had been her brother, and they were playing some lightheart game, or taking positions for an old-time dance of woven hands and measured paces.

Valentine la Nina led John d’Albret into a summer parlour, equally secure from escape, being surrounded by the high fortress walls of the Hotel of the Inquisition, but full of rich twilight, of flowers, of broidery, and of faint wafted perfumes from forgotten shawl or dropped kerchief, which told of a woman’s abiding there.

“Now,” said Valentine la Nina, throwing herself back luxuriously on a wide divan of Seville, her hands clasped behind her head, “tell me all there is to tell keep back nothing. Then we will take counsel what is best to be done! I have not forgotten, if you have!”

And John d’Albret, exhausted by the ceaseless searching of the Eyes into his soul, and the need of the dark which would not come, told her all. To which Valentine la Nina listened, and saw the fear fade out and the reasonable man return. But as John d’Albret spoke, something moved strangely in the depths of her own heart. Her face flushed; her temples throbbed; her hands grew chill.

“And you have done this for the sake of a woman of a girl?” she said.

“For Claire Agnew’s sake,” the Abbe John answered, still uncertainly; “so would any one any one who loved her!”

Valentine la Nina smiled, stirring uneasily on her divan, and as she smiled she sighed also, leaning forward, her great eyes on the youth.

“Any one?” she repeated, “any one who loved her! Aye, it may be so. She is a happy girl. I have found none such. I am fair I should be loved. Yet I have only served and served and served all my life ah!”

Suddenly, with a quick under-sob and an outward drive of the palm, as if to thrust away some hateful thing, she rose to her feet and caught John d’Albret by the wrist. So lithe was her body that it seemed one single gesture.

“If I had met you before she did,” she whispered fiercely, “would you have loved me like that? Answer me! Answer me! I command you! It is life or death, I tell you!”

But the Abbe John, not yet himself, could only stare at her blindly. The girl’s eyes, large and mystic, held him in that dim place, and some of his pain returned. He covered his face with both hands.

She shook him fiercely.

“Look at me you are a man,” she cried, “say am I not beautiful? You have said it already. If you had not met this Huguenot this daughter of Geneva, would you have loved me not as men, ordinary men love, but as you have loved, with a love strong enough to brave prison, torture, and death for me for me?”

The Abbe John, too greatly astonished to answer in words, gazed at the strange girl. Suddenly the anger dropped, the fierce curves faded from the lips that had been so haughty. Her eyes were soft and moist with unshed tears.

Valentine la Nina was pleading with him.

“Say it,” she said, “oh, even if it be not true say it! It would be such a good lie. It would comfort a torn heart, made ever to do the thing it hates. If I had been a fisher-girl spreading nets on the sands, a shepherdess on the hills, some brown sailor-lad or a bearded shepherd would have loved me for myself. Children would have played about my door. Like other women, I would have had the sweet bitterness of life on my lips. I would have sorrowed as others, rejoiced as others. And, when all was done, turned my face to the wall and died as others, my children about me, my man’s hand in mine. But now now I am only poor Valentine la Nina, the tool of the League, the plaything of politics, the lure of the Jesuits, a thing to be used when bright, thrown away when rusted, but loved never! No, not even by those who use me, and, in using, kill me!”

And the Abbe John, moved at sight of the pain, answered as best he might.

“A man can only love as the love comes to him,” he murmured. “What might have been, I do not know. I have thought I loved many, but I never knew that I loved till I saw little Claire Agnew.”

“But if you had not tell me,” she sobbed; “I will be content, if you will only tell me.”

“I do not know,” said John d’Albret, driven into a corner; “perhaps I might if I had seen you first.”

To the young man it seemed an easy thing to say a necessary thing, indeed. For, coming fresh from the fear and the place of torment, he was glad to say anything not to be sent thither again.

“But say it,” she cried, coming nearer and clasping his arm hard, “say it all not that you might, but that you would with the same love that goes easily to death, that I I I might escape. Oh, for me, I would go to a thousand deaths if only I knew surely surely, that one man in the world would do as much for me!”

But the Abbe John had reached his limit. Not even to escape the Place of the Eyes could he deny his love, or affirm that he could ever have loved to the death any but his little Claire.

“I saw her, and I loved!” he said simply “that is all I know. Had I seen you, I might have loved that also I do not know. More I cannot say. But be assured that, if I had loved you, not knowing the other, I should have counted, for your sake, my poor life but as a leaf, wind-blown, a petal fallen in the way.”

Valentine la Nina nervously crumpled the glorious red and fleshy blossoms of the pomegranate clusters in her fingers, till they fell in blood-drops on the floor.

“You are noble,” she said; “I knew it when I saw you at Collioure on the hillside more, a prince in your own land, near to the throne even. So am I and Philip the King himself would not deny me. He is your country’s enemy. Yet at my request he would stay his hand. He must fight the English. He must subdue the Low Countries. That is his oath. But if you will if you will he would aid the Bearnais, or better still, you yourself to a throne, and give me who can say what? perhaps this very Roussillon for a dower. For I am close of kin to the King. He would acknowledge me as such. I have vowed a vow, but now it is almost paid; and if it were not I would go to the Pope himself, though I walked every step of the road to Rome!”

“I cannot I cannot ” cried John d’Albret. “Thank God, I am not of the first-born of kings, whose hands are put up to the highest bidder. Where I have loved, there will I wed or not at all!”

“Ah, cruel!” cried Valentine la Nina, stamping her foot “cruel, not only to me, but to her whom you say you love. Think you she will be safe from the Society, from the Holy Office in France? There is no rack or torture perhaps, no Place of Eyes. But was Henry of Valois safe, who slew the Duke of Guise? From whose bosom came forth Jacques Clement? My uncle put the knife in his hand and blessed him ere he went. For me he would do more. Think this Claire of yours is condemned already. She is young. By your own telling she has many lovers. She will be happy. I know the heart of such maids. Besides, she has never promised you anything never humbled herself to you as I I, Valentine la Nina, who till now have been the proudest maid in Spain!”

“I am not worthy,” cried the Abbe John. “I cannot; I dare not; I will not!”

“Ah,” said Valentine la Nina, with a long rising inflection, and drawing herself back from him, “I have found it ever so with you heretics. You are willing to die to suffer. Because then you would wear the martyr’s crown, and have your name commemorated in books, on tablets, and be lauded by the outcasts of Geneva. But for your own living folk you will do nothing. With all Roussillon, from Salses to the Pyrénées, for my dowry (Philip would be glad to be rid of it and perhaps also of me my friends of the Society are too strong for him), there would be an end to this prisoning and burning and torturing through the land. Teruel and Frey Tullio we would send to their own place. By a word you could save thousands. Yet you will not. You think only of one chit of a girl, who laughs at you, who cares not the snap of her finger for you!”

She stopped, panting with her own vehemence.

“Likely enough,” said the Abbe John, “the more is the pity. But that cannot change my heart.”

“Was her love for you like mine?” she cried; “did she love you from the first moment she saw you? NO! Has she done for you what I have done risked my all my uncle’s anger the Society’s that of the Holy Office even? No! No! No! She has done none of these things. She has only graciously permitted you to serve her on your knees she, the daughter of a spy, a common go-between of your Huguenot and heretic princes! Shame on you, Jean d’Albret of Bourbon, you, a cousin of the King of France, thus to give yourself up to fanatics and haters of religion.”

But by this time the Abbe John was completely master of himself. He could carry forward the interview much more successfully on these lines.

“I am no Huguenot,” he said calmly, “more is the pity, indeed. I have no claim to be zealous for any religion. I have fought on the Barricades of Paris for the Guise, because I was but an idle fellow and there was much excitement and shouting. I have fought for the Bearnais, not because he is a Huguenot, but because he is my good cousin and a brave soldier none like him.”

Valentine la Nina waved her hand in contempt.

“None like him!” she exclaimed. “Have you never heard of my cousin Alexander of Parma? To him your Bearnais is no better than a ruffler, a banditti captain, a guerilla chief. If you must fight, why, we will go to him. It is a service worth a thousand of the other. Then you will learn the art of war indeed ”

“Aye, against my countrymen,” said John d’Albret, with firmness. Bit by bit his courage was coming back to him. “I am but a poor idlish fellow, who have taken little thought of religion, Huguenot or Catholic. Once I had thought she would teach me, if life had been given me, and and if she had been willing. But now I must take what Fate sends, and trust that if I die untimeously, the Judge I shall chance to meet may prove less stern than He of the Genevan’s creed, and less cruel than the God of Dom Teruel and the Holy Inquisition!”

“Then you refuse?” She uttered the words in a low strained voice. “You refuse what I have offered? But I shall put it once more honourable wedlock with an honourable maiden, of a house as good as your own, a province for your dower, the most Catholic King for sponsor of your vows, noble service, and it like you, with the greatest captain of the age, the safety of all your kin, free speech, free worship, the entrance of these thousands of French folk into France. Ah, and love love such as the pale daughters of the north never dreamt of ”

She took a step towards him, her clasped hands pleading for her, her lips quivering, her head thrown back so far that the golden comb slipped, and a heavy drift of hair, the colour of ripe oats, fell in waves far below her shoulders.

“Do not let the chance go by,” she said, “because you think you do not love me now. That will come in time. I know it will come. I would love you so that it could not help but come!”

“I cannot ah, I cannot!” said John d’Albret, his eyes on the floor, so that he might not see the pain he could not cure.

The girl drew herself up, clenched her hands, and with a hissing indraw of the breath, she cried, “You cannot you mean you will not, because you love the other the spy’s daughter of whom I will presently make an end, as a child kills a fly on a window-pane for my pleasure!”

“No,” said John d’Albret clearly, lifting his head and looking into the angry eyes, flashing murkily as the sunlight flashes in the deep water at a harbour mouth or in some estuary “no, I will not do any of the things you ask of me. And the reason is, as you have said, because I love Claire Agnew until I die. I know not at all whether she loves me or not. And to me that makes no matter ”

“No, you say right,” cried Valentine la Nina, “it will indeed make no difference. For by these words they are printed on my heart you have condemned her; the spy’s daughter to the knife, and yourself ”

“To the fires of the Inquisition?” demanded the Abbe John. “I am ready!”

“Nay, not so fast,” said Valentine la Nina, “that were far too easy a death too quick. You shall go to the galleys among the lowest criminals, your feet in the rotting wash of the bilge, lingering out a slow death-in-life slow very slow, the lash on your back and no, no I cannot believe this is your answer. Here, here is yet one chance. Surely I have not humbled myself only for this?”

The Abbe John answered nothing, and after a pause the girl drew herself up to her height, and spoke to him through her clenched teeth.

“You shall go to the galleys and pray ah, you say you have never learned to pray, but you will you will on Philip’s galleys. They make good theologians there; they practise. You will pray in vain for the death that will not come. And I, when I wake in the night, will turn me and sleep the sweeter on my pillow for the thought of you chained to your oar, which you will never quit alive. Ah, I will teach you, Jean d’Albret of the house of Bourbon, cousin of kings, what it is to love the spy’s daughter, and to despise me me Valentine la Nina, a daughter of the King of Spain!”