The private story of King Egica is a curious and an unedifying one, told at length by Lozana in his _Reyes Nuevos_ and by the Conde de Mora in his History of Toledo. Egica fell violently in love with his niece, Doña Luz, who, on her side, loved more passionately than wisely her other uncle, Don Favila. Favila seems a disreputable enough fellow, since he took the last advantage of his niece's passion, and left her to face the most atrocious troubles that might have ceased by manly behaviour on his part. It is one of those complicated and incomprehensible episodes in history that leave us aghast. Favila is elsewhere supposed to have murdered his brother by a blow on the head for the sake of that brother's wife. At any-rate he pursued Doña Luz and, as Lozana naïvely asserts, with her permission entered her bedroom one night, and there kneeling before the statue of the Virgin (exquisite absence of all sense of the ludicrous revealed even in modern Spanish plays where the same sort of thing happens), they proclaim themselves man and wife with the usual results. In a little while the watchful and suspicious king perceives that his niece, Doña Luz, is _enceinte_. The lady understands her own and the coming infant's danger, so she has an ark made, and after a secret delivery, places the infant in it like another Moses, with quantities of linen, jewellery and money, and her women float it down the Tagus, where, by a miracle, it is found by her uncle, Grafeses, who lives at Alcántara. Not knowing whose is the child, Grafeses takes it home. At Toledo the king suspects what has happened, but can find out nothing definite, so, still true to biblical tradition, he decides to tackle the new-born infants. He sends for a list of all the children born in and without Toledo during the past three months, with the name of each father, hoping thus to discover an unfathered babe with which to charge Doña Luz. The number of babies born during the three months in the city of Toledo reached 10,428, and in the suburbs surpassed 25,000. What a different story from that of to-day! One wonders where there was room for the immense population of olden times. Alas for the vindictive king! All the babies had authentic fathers and mothers, and there was no reaching Doña Luz by this device. There remained another and less primitive vengeance. He ordered one of his gentlemen, Melias, to attack her publicly as "a lost woman." Because she refused to become _his_ mistress, and became somebody else's (his brother's), he decided she should be burnt for impurity. Excellent logic of man! On Doña Luz's first appearance at Court Melias charged her with impropriety, and the king fiercely ordered her to reply to the accusation. "My Lord," said Luz, with much dignity, "how would you have me reply to such a charge? God knows, and you, my lord, see that I cannot give him the reply he merits, since he is a cavalier and yet accuses me, a woman, of evil."