marry her sister, evil might befall her. Speaking of the marriage she says: "I bait him with this ... and his words and professions have changed for the better, although his acts remain the same.... They fancy that I have no more in me than what outwardly appears, or that I shall not be able to fathom his (Puebla's) design." Under stress of her circumstances Katharine was developing rapidly. She was no longer a girl dependent upon others. Doña Elvira had gone for good; Puebla she hated and distrusted as much as she did Henry; and there was no one by her to whom she could look for help. Her position was a terribly difficult one, pitted alone, as she was, against the most unscrupulous politicians in Europe, in whose hands she knew she was only one of the pieces in a game. Juana was still carrying about with her the unburied corpse of her husband, and falling into paroxysms of fury when a second marriage was suggested to her; and yet Katharine considered it necessary to keep up the pretence to Henry that his suit was prospering. She knew that though the Archduchess Margaret had firmly refused to tempt providence again by a third marriage with the King of England, the boy sovereign of Castile and Flanders, the Archduke Charles, had been securely betrothed to golden-haired little Mary Tudor, Henry's younger daughter; and that the close alliance thus sealed was as dangerous to her father King Ferdinand's interests as to her own. And yet she was either forced, or forced herself, to paint Henry, who was still treating her vilely, in the brightest colours as a chivalrous, virtuous gentleman, really and desperately in love with poor crazy Juana. Katharine's letters to her sister on behalf of Henry's suit are nauseous, in view of the circumstances as we know them; and show that the Princess of Wales was already prepared to sacrifice every human feeling to political expediency.