In the thought of him that filled her heart and soul and mind, she saw that her own life had begun when he had first spoken to her, and she felt that it would end with the last good-by, because if he should die or cease to love her, there would be nothing more to live for.  Her early girlhood seemed dim and far away, dull and lifeless, as if it had not been hers at all, and had no connection with the present.  She saw herself in the past, as she could not see herself now, and the child she remembered seemed not herself but another—­a fair-haired girl living in the gloomy old house in Valladolid, with her blind sister and an old maiden cousin of her father’s, who had offered to bring up the two and to teach them, being a woman of some learning, and who fulfilled her promise in such a conscientious and austere way as made their lives something of a burden under her strict rule.  But that was all forgotten now, and though she still lived in Valladolid she had probably changed but little in the few years since Dolores had seen her; she was part of the past, a relic of something that had hardly ever had a real existence, and which it was not at all necessary to remember.  There was one great light in the girl’s simple existence, it had come all at once, and it was with her still.  There was nothing dim nor dark nor forgotten about the day when she had been presented at court by the Duchess Alvarez, and she had first seen Don John, and he had first seen her and had spoken to her, when he had talked with the Duchess herself.  At the first glance—­and it was her first sight of the great world—­she had seen that of all the men in the great hall, there was no one at all like him.  She had no sooner looked into his face and cast her eyes upon his slender figure, all in white then, as he was dressed to-night, than she began to compare him with the rest.  She looked so quickly from one to another that any one might have thought her to be anxiously searching for a friend in the crowd.  But she had none then, and she was but assuring herself once, and for all her life, that the man she was to love was immeasurably beyond all other men, though the others were the very flower of Spain’s young chivalry.

Of course, as she told herself now, she had not loved him then, nor even when she heard his voice speaking to her the first time and was almost too happy to understand his words.  But she had remembered them.  He had asked her whether she lived in Madrid.  She had told him that she lived in the Alcazar itself, since her father commanded the guards and had his quarters in the palace.  And then Don John had looked at her very fixedly for a moment, and had seemed pleased, for he smiled and said that he hoped he might see her often, and that if it were in his power to be of use to her father, he would do what he could.  She was sure that she had not loved him then, though she had dreamed of his winning face and voice and had thought of little else all the next day, and the