Her complexion was fair and bright; her features delicate and harmonious; she was bewitching rather than beautiful--quite enough so to be the heroine even of a romance! and the _Madre Abadesa_ of Miraflores, who had very special instructions given her regarding the care of this young lady, had accorded her the secluded apartment with the projecting window--a circumstance which led to the young knight discovering and making her acquaintance, a fact that would have filled the good lady with intense dismay--for by flirting their falcons, the young pair had come to a flirtation, and rather more, between themselves. In those days he who bore the hawk on his left wrist in the most graceful way, was deemed the most accomplished cavalier; and to please ladies, it was the fashion to play flirty tricks with the pinions of their hawks. Thus, more than once, when passing, had the strange knight's hawk flown upward to the full length of its silken jess to flirt with the merlin on the hand of the lady, and hence it came to pass that the owners met as we find them. In those days people seem to have fallen in love more suddenly and desperately than they do in our railway times, and their love seemed always to delight in struggling with difficulties. There was much of the Romeo and Juliet passionate tenderness in the suddenly-developed regard of these two, but we cannot suppose that the lovers of those days spoke more 'on stilts' than those of the present time. The old story that was first told in Eden will have ever the tender trivialities and endearing epithets, so we shall imagine all these said, and come to prose at once. 'Your name, señor mio--dear love rather--in all your visits you have never yet told it to me?' she said softly. 'I have to win it yet,' he replied. 'Where?' she asked. 'Where does a hidalgo win his name save in battle against the Moorish curs? When so won, you shall know it. But yours, sweet lady?' 'May not, must not, be told to one who conceals his own.' 'But I must call you something, Estrella mia,' said he tenderly. 'Then your "star" be it,' said she, laughing and kissing her hand to him, 'and my love and my prayers go with you to battle.' 'Nay, I go not to battle just now.' 'Whither then, and armed thus?' 'To fulfil a vow of vengeance on a craven who smote my aged father on the beard with his mailed hand.' 'Is it not better to forgive?' 'Some things, perhaps, but not a deed like that! Ay de mi, is it not hard for you to be shut up in this solitary place, dependent on yourself for all joy and amusement?' 'Nay, señor mio, I am content; and is not contentment joy? I shall never be happier than I am, till I rejoin my dear old father.' 'Where?' asked the knight. 'To tell that would be to disclose myself.' 'Tie a ribbon to my lance-head, thou dear one, and I shall dip it in the blood of him I have vowed to slay.' She did so, saying in the spirit of the age: