to your cheeks and the warmth to your dear hands!  I would have given anything for that, and you would rather that I should have been there, would you not?” She laughed low and kissed away the answer from his lips.  “If I had stayed beside you, it would have been sooner, love.  You would have felt me there even in your dream of death, and you would have put out your hand to come back to me.  Say that you would!  You could not have let me lie there many minutes longer breaking my heart over you and wanting to die, too, so that we might be buried together.  Surely my kisses would have brought you back!”

“I dreamed they did, as mine would you.”

“Sit down beside me,” she said presently.  “It will be very hard to tell—­and it cannot be very long before they come.  Oh, they may find me here!  It cannot matter now, for I told them all that I had been long in your room to-night.”

“Told them all?  Told whom?  The King?  What did you say?” His face was grave again.

“The King, the court, the whole world.  But it is harder to tell you.”  She blushed and looked away.  “It was the King that wounded you—­I heard you fall.”

“Scratched me.  I was only stunned for a while.”

“He drew his sword, for I heard it.  You know the sound a sword makes when it is drawn from a leathern sheath?  Of course—­you are a soldier!  I have often watched my father draw his, and I know the soft, long pull.  The King drew quickly, and I knew you were unarmed, and besides—­you had promised me that you would not raise your hand against him.”

“I remember that my sword was on the table in its scabbard.  I got it into my hand, sheathed as it was, to guard myself.  Where is it?  I had forgotten that.  It must be somewhere on the floor.”

“Never mind—­your men will find it.  You fell, and then there was silence, and presently I heard my father’s voice saying that he had killed you defenceless.  They went away.  I was half dead myself when I fell there beside you on the floor.  There—­do you see?  You lay with your head towards the door and one arm out.  I shall see you so till I die, whenever I think of it.  Then—­I forget.  Adonis must have found me there, and he carried me away, and Inez met me on the terrace and she had heard my father tell the King that he had murdered you—­and it was the King who had done it!  Do you understand?”

“I see, yes.  Go on!” Don John was listening breathlessly, forgetting the pain he still suffered from time to time.

“And then I went down, and I made Don Ruy Gomez stand beside me on the steps, and the whole court was there—­the Grandees and the great dukes—­Alva, Medina Sidonia, Medina Cali, Infantado, the Princess of Eboli—­the Ambassadors, everyone, all the maids of honour, hundreds and hundreds—­an ocean of faces, and they knew me, almost all of them.”

“What did you say?” asked Don John very anxiously.  “What did you tell them all?  That you had been here?”