“I need not add, it was immediately subsequent to this, that my second visit was received so haughtily.--About this period your majesty remained several days absent from the villa, a circumstance which alarmed the yet-unfixed hopes of Gonsalva: nightly Urracca watched from the upper window of a turret where her mistress had granted you permission to appear. One night she descried your royal person from afar, and hastening down to inform Gonsalva, heard her propose to charm you, by a seemingly unstudied display of her melodious voice. Assured of your rank, Sire! instructed in your character by him who knew you best, she learnt how to inflame your passion by a thousand charming caprices, till she had brought you to the point desired.--Meanwhile Antonio”---- “Ah what of Antonio?” interrupted the King, his limbs quivering with restrained emotion, “did he conspire?--damned, damned dissembler!” he added, losing his self-command, “when I was weaving him into my soul--when I trusted him--poured out my love-sick heart to him alone----boy, idiot, bubble that I was!--O De Castro, these are recollections to madden!--I regret not such perfidious wretches, but my blood grows fire when I think of the jest they must have made of feelings like mine!” Sebastian trod the apartment with fierce and irregular steps; De Castro looked on him with an air of tender compassion--this sensibility to injuries recalled their first interview at Lisbon, and he lamented its continuance. “Donna Gonsalva, he resumed, “determined not to disclose her secret to Antonio till confident of your Majesty’s settled passion; your own august lips first revealed it to the prior: surprize and resentment nearly banished his discretion, but never having dared to let your Majesty know the libertine license in which he indulged himself, he was restrained from avowing any knowledge of Count Vimiosa’s daughter.--Of course their subsequent meeting was one of reproach: Gonsalva conquered.” “She pleaded to Antonio the necessity of covering the consequences of their intrigue by some marriage, and since he could not legitimatize the child she carried, it was fortunate for them both, that instead of resigning herself to the _observing, frigid De Castro_ (this was the epithet she gave me, Sire!) she might aggrandize their offspring by a union with Majesty itself. “Antonio had yielded to her arguments, and they were impatiently waiting the arrival of Vimiosa from France to break through the engagement with me, when this abhorrent secret was confided to me by Urracca.--The woman spoke with a dying breath, could I doubt her veracity?--recovering that presence of mind which the shock had deprived me of, I besought her to repeat the story in confession to a holy friar who might hereafter support my testimony; she expired ere he arrived.