“_Por Cristo!_ I will go!” cries a loud voice, desecrating the fair night by its rough accent, as three muffled figures emerge for a moment into the light, where a lofty portal opens into the centre of the cloister, filled with the graves of monks, who even in death cling to the sacred precincts. “I will go, and no man shall hinder me! With me shall come my trusty Don Juan and our brother Garcia. Ha! ha! Mañara,” addressing the tallest of the three figures, “you are always ready. How many ladies expect you in Seville at the Calle near the Lonja? See how sober a man is your sovereign. One lady love is all I claim. One, ineffable, divine! Now, I ask in all fairness, and I appeal to you, Mañara, can Albuquerque here (who has limed me like a falcon) reproach me if I fly back to the nest of love, after I have seen the baby-faced traitress he has chosen? _Sangre de Dio!_ The thought of Maria makes me mad.” His speech was succeeded by a dead silence. Don Juan did not answer. There was a brutal coarseness of expression in the king which, as a knight and a caballero, he disapproved. Not so the third figure, Don Garcia de Padilla, standing a little aloof, as waiting to be addressed, who bowed to the ground, then further retreated into the gloom cast by the shadow of the clustered columns. Then the grave voice of Albuquerque responds: “My lord, you have no just cause of suspicion against the queen. She is very young, and could be moulded like wax in your hand.” “That is my affair!” answers the king, whose choleric temper is rising. “As facile as a dancing-girl. Nay, more so, for aught I know--for those devils of _gitañas_ have a code of honour of their own. I have proved her. Even in my presence she could not conceal her love for the cursed bastard. I never wanted a wife; you forced her on me. But such a one as this is not worthy to mate with our jester. We will duly dispose of her, were she a thousand times cousin to the King of France.” “Beware, my lord, what you do,” interposes Albuquerque, with the unhesitating frankness he alone dared use. But Don Pedro continues without heeding him: “There is a prophecy about me, you say, of which you think much, ‘_I must kill or be killed._’ Excellent reasoning! We will see to it by-and-by. For the present, the Lady Blanche shall spend her honeymoon in the strong castle of Talavera, and the Grand Master may find the air of exile favourable to his health.” To all this, spoken in a hard, grating voice, with the incessant and uneasy movement which always marked Don Pedro’s bursts of fury, Albuquerque, his arms folded under his mantle, listened in silence. Whether Don Pedro had expected some violent reproaches and was angered that they did not come, or whether, knowing the madness of what he was about to do, he had laid himself out to combat argument and reason, the effect of enraging him was all the same. He trembled with passion, and struck upon the pavement with his heel.