“I ask justice, not mercy, Sire,” said Dolores, in a firm, low voice, and the fire lightened in her eyes.

“Your father shall have both,” answered Philip, “for they are compatible.”

“He needs no mercy,” returned the young girl, “for he has done no harm.  Your Majesty knows that as well as I.”

“If I knew that, my dear, your father would not be under arrest.  I cannot guess what you know or do not know—­”

“I know the truth.”  She spoke so confidently that the King’s expression changed a little.

“I wish I did,” he answered, with as much suavity as ever.  “But tell me what you think you know about this matter.  You may help me to sift it, and then I shall be the better able to help you, if such a thing be possible.  What do you know?”

Dolores leaned forward toward him from her seat, almost rising as she lowered her voice to a whisper, her eyes fixed on his face.

“I was close behind the door your Majesty wished to open,” she said.  “I heard every word; I heard your sword drawn and I heard Don John fall—­and then it was some time before I heard my father’s voice, taking the blame upon himself, lest it should be said that the King had murdered his own brother in his room, unarmed.  Is that the truth, or not?”

While she was speaking, a greenish hue overspread Philip’s face, ghastly in the candlelight.  He sat upright in his chair, his hands straining on its arms and pushing, as if he would have got farther back if he could.  He had foreseen everything except that Dolores had been in the next room, for his secret spies had informed him through Perez that her father had kept her a prisoner during the early part of the evening and until after supper.

“When you were both gone,” Dolores continued, holding him under her terrible eyes, “I came in, and I found him dead, with the wound in his left breast, and he was unarmed, murdered without a chance for his life.  There is blood upon my dress where it touched his—­the blood of the man I loved, shed by you.  Ah, he was right to call you coward, and he died for me, because you said things of me that no loving man would bear.  He was right to call you coward—­it was well said—­it was the last word he spoke, and I shall not forget it.  He had borne everything you heaped upon himself, your insults, your scorn of his mother, but he would not let you cast a slur upon my name, and if you had not killed him out of sheer cowardice, he would have struck you in the face.  He was a man!  And then my father took the blame to save you from the monstrous accusation, and that all might believe him guilty he told the lie that saved you before them all.  Do I know the truth?  Is one word of that not true?”

She had quite risen now and stood before him like an accusing angel.  And he, who was seldom taken unawares, and was very hard to hurt, leaned back and suffered, slowly turning his head from side to side against the back of the high carved chair.