Don John was all in dazzling white—­white velvet, white satin, white silk, white lace, white shoes, and wearing neither sword nor ornament of any kind, the most faultless vision of young and manly grace that ever glided through a woman’s dream.

His place was on the King’s right, and he passed along the platform of the throne with an easy, unhesitating step, and an almost boyish smile of pleasure at the sounds he heard, and at the flutter of excitement that was in the air, rather to be felt than otherwise perceived.  Coming up the steps of the throne, he bent one knee before his brother, who held out his ungloved hand for him to kiss—­and when that was done, he knelt again before the Queen, who did likewise.  Then, bowing low as he passed back before the King, he descended one step and took the chair set for him in the place that was for the royal princes.

He was alone there, for Philip was again childless at his fourth marriage, and it was not until long afterwards that a son was born who lived to succeed him; and there were no royal princesses in Madrid, so that Don John was his brother’s only near blood relation at the court, and since he had been acknowledged he would have had his place by right, even if he had not beaten the Moriscoes in the south and won back Granada.

After him came the high Ministers of State and the ambassadors in a rich and stately train, led in by Don Antonio Perez, the King’s new favourite, a man of profound and evil intelligence, upon whom Philip was to rely almost entirely during ten years, whom he almost tortured to death for his crimes, and who in the end escaped him, outlived him, and died a natural death, in Paris, when nearly eighty.  With these came also the court ladies, the Queen’s Mistress of the Robes, and the maids of honour, and with the ladies was Dona Ana de la Cerda, Princess of Eboli and Melito and Duchess of Pastrana, the wife of old Don Ruy Gomez de Silva, the Minister.  It was said that she ruled her husband, and Antonio Perez and the King himself, and that she was faithless to all three.

She was not more than thirty years of age at that time, and she looked younger when seen in profile.  But one facing her might have thought her older from the extraordinary and almost masculine strength of her small head and face, compact as a young athlete’s, too square for a woman’s, with high cheekbones, deep-set black eyes and eyebrows that met between them, and a cruel red mouth that always curled a little just when she was going to speak, and showed extraordinarily perfect little teeth, when the lips parted.  Yet she was almost beautiful when she was not angry or in a hurtful mood.  The dark complexion was as smooth as a perfect peach, and tinged with warm colour, and her eyes could be like black opals, and no woman in Spain or Andalusia could match her for grace of figure and lightness of step.