Now an unknown enemy had killed him: not in fair fight, not in the open, on the field of honour, but--as her father said--in a tavern, in the dark, surreptitiously, treacherously; and donna Lenora in an agony of passionate resentment had at last broken the silence which had almost frightened her father and had suddenly called out with fierce intensity: "Satan! Satan! Assassin!" Her father had given her an account of the horrible incident, which was nothing but a tissue of falsehoods from beginning to end, and Lenora had listened and believed. How could she doubt her own father? She hardly knew him--and he was all she had in the world on whom to pour out the wealth of her affection and of her faith. II Truth to tell, de Vargas had received the news of don Ramon’s death with unbounded satisfaction. Lenora had obeyed him and had been this night publicly affianced to Mark van Rycke; but between her consent to the marriage and her willingness to become Alva’s tool as a spy among her husband’s people there was the immeasurable abyss of a woman’s temperament and a woman’s natural pity for the oppressed. But the outrage to-night--the murder of the man whom she still loved despite paternal prohibitions--was bound to react on the girl’s warm and passionate nature--and react in the manner which her father desired. He trusted to his own powers of lying, to place the case before his daughter in its most lurid light. He had at once spoken of "spies" and "assassins" and his words had been well chosen. Within a few moments after he had told Lenora the news, he felt that he could play like a skilled musician upon every string of her overwrought sensibilities. Her heart had already been very sore at being forced to part from her first lover; now that the parting had suddenly become irrevocable in this horrible way, all the pent up passion, fierce resentment and wrath which she had felt against her future husband and his people could by clever manipulation be easily merged into an equally fierce desire for revenge. It was a cruel game to play with a young girl who by blood and race was made to feel every emotion with super-acuteness: but de Vargas was not the man who would ever allow pity or chivalry to interfere with his schemes: he saw in his daughter’s mental suffering, in the shattering of her nerves and the horror which had well-nigh paralysed her, nothing but a guarantee of success for that comprehensive project which had the death of the Prince of Orange for its ultimate aim. "It is strange," murmured the girl after awhile, "that when Ramon talked with me in the Town House last night, he said that these Netherlanders had a habit of striking at an enemy in the dark."