He swallowed a last scrap of pastry, and dusted his fingers delicately. An emaciated little man of sixty, with over-blown forehead, small-pupilled ice-blue eyes, and pinched aquiline nose, not all his power nor all his dominions could redeem him from the charge of personal insignificance. His mouth was repulsively wide; his lower jaw, from which bristled a point of grizzled beard, once dusty yellow, was so protruded as to thrust into prominence a disorder of broken teeth like an old bulldog’s. He was dressed unostentatiously in velvet doublet, trunk-hose and curt-manteau, all black, and the collar of the Golden Fleece hung round his neck under a small ruff. Such was Philip, as he sat regarding, without one spasm of emotion, the human wreck before him. Illiterate, infinitesimal-minded, pusillanimous, a disgusting debauchee, he had no one virtue in all the world but sincerity, and with that he endowed a thousand crimes. The monstrous idolatry, through him, of the hereditary principle he embodied, had long supplied its own moral in the torture and immolation of countless hosts of guiltless, happy human beings, in scores of midnight assassinations, in the poisoning of the very springs of nature. Let it be said of him that the murder of his own son was his greatest act of grace, and there is the man summarised. An English Jesuit, Father Allen, the King’s principal authority for the statement about the Catholic nobility, hung confidentially over his Majesty’s chair, his chill grey eyes scanning the figure of that mutilated fellow-countryman. A second, a Spaniard, but of the like black cloth and inhuman aspect, stood motionless near the prisoner. The King, having cleansed his fingers, glanced up covertly (to the day of his own agonised death he could never look any man, not even the meanest, in the face) and spoke suddenly, in the rapid voice that always seemed to grudge its own utterance: “The gnat will kill the King! Were those the man’s words?” Allen looked towards his colleague, who answered in a passionless voice: “Those and little else--the constant burden of his blasphemy. On the pulley, on the rack, wrenched in the ‘Escalero,’ or with the greased soles of his feet frying at the brazier, always that cry or song. He utters it as it were a charm against pain, jubilant, triumphant.” His Majesty’s eyes frowned. “Methinks the Holy Office lacks a counter-charm. Has it no hooks to root up speech, no blistering gags to choke it? Bid him construe his words, or suffer worse.” “It seems that feeling is dead in him,” said the Father adviser, “killed like a bird in the hand. He is own brother to Balthazar Gérard, who, after all, was a martyr. But it is just a trick of the spirit, detaching itself from the matter it makes sensitive. Shall I question the man?” Philip waved his hand, and Allen crossed the closet and stood before William Donne, an ingratiatory smile on his lips.