"Now," said Valentine la Niña, throwing herself back luxuriously on a wide divan of Seville, her hands clasped behind her head, "tell me all there is to tell--keep back nothing. Then we will take counsel what is best to be done! I have not forgotten, if you have!" And John d'Albret, exhausted by the ceaseless searching of the Eyes into his soul, and the need of the dark which would not come, told her all. To which Valentine la Niña listened, and saw the fear fade out and the reasonable man return. But as John d'Albret spoke, something moved strangely in the depths of her own heart. Her face flushed; her temples throbbed; her hands grew chill. "And you have done this for the sake of a woman--of a girl?" she said. "For Claire Agnew's sake," the Abbé John answered, still uncertainly; "so would any one--any one who loved her!" Valentine la Niña smiled, stirring uneasily on her divan, and as she smiled she sighed also, leaning forward, her great eyes on the youth. "Any one?" she repeated, "any one who loved her! Aye, it may be so. She is a happy girl. I have found none such. I am fair--I should be loved. Yet I have only served and served and served all my life--ah!" Suddenly, with a quick under-sob and an outward drive of the palm, as if to thrust away some hateful thing, she rose to her feet and caught John d'Albret by the wrist. So lithe was her body that it seemed one single gesture. "If I had met you before she did," she whispered fiercely, "would you have loved me like that? Answer me! Answer me! I command you! It is life or death, I tell you!" But the Abbé John, not yet himself, could only stare at her blindly. The girl's eyes, large and mystic, held him in that dim place, and some of his pain returned. He covered his face with both hands. She shook him fiercely. "Look at me--you are a man," she cried, "say--am I not beautiful? You have said it already. If you had not met this Huguenot--this daughter of Geneva, would you have loved me--not as men, ordinary men love, but as you have loved, with a love strong enough to brave prison, torture, and death for me--for me?" The Abbé John, too greatly astonished to answer in words, gazed at the strange girl. Suddenly the anger dropped, the fierce curves faded from the lips that had been so haughty. Her eyes were soft and moist with unshed tears. Valentine la Niña was pleading with him.