He was too much stunned to ask himself how the lovers had met, if there had been any agreement between them, but the frightful conviction took hold of him that this was not the first time, that long ago, before Don John had led the army to Granada, Dolores had found her way to that same door and had spent long hours with her lover when no one knew.  Else she could not have gone to him without agreement, at an instant’s notice, on the very night of his return.

Despair took possession of the unhappy man from that moment.  But that the King was with Don John, Mendoza would have gone back at that moment to kill his enemy and himself afterwards, if need be.  He remembered his errand then.  No doubt that was the very room where Dolores had been concealed, and she had escaped from it by some other way, of which her father did not know.  He was too dazed to think connectedly, but he had the King’s commands to execute at once.  He straightened himself with a great effort, for the weight of his years had come upon him suddenly and bowed him like a burden.  With the exertion of his will came the thirst for the satisfaction of blood, and he saw that the sooner he returned with the key, the sooner he should be near his enemy.  But the pulses came and went in his throbbing temples, as when a man is almost spent in a struggle with death, and at first he walked uncertainly, as if he felt no ground under his feet.

By the time he had gone a hundred yards he had recovered a sort of mechanical self-possession, such as comes upon men at very desperate times, when they must not allow themselves to stop and think of what is before them.  They were pictures, rather than thoughts, that formed themselves in his brain as he went along, for he saw all the past years again, from the day when his young wife had died, he being then already in middle age, until that afternoon.  One by one the years came back, and the central figure in each was the fair-haired little child, growing steadily to be a woman, all coming nearer and nearer to the end he had seen but now, which was unutterable shame and disgrace, and beyond which there was nothing.  He heard the baby voice again, and felt the little hands upon his brow, and saw the serious grey eyes close to his own; and then the girl, gravely lovely—­and her far-off laugh that hardly ever rippled through the room when he was there; and then the stealing softness of grown maidenhood, winning the features one by one, and bringing back from death to life the face he had loved best, and the voice with long-forgotten tones that touched his soul’s quick, and dimmed his sight with a mist, so that he grew hard and stern as he fought within him against the tenderness he loved and feared.  All this he saw and heard and felt again, knowing that each picture must end but in one way, in the one sight he had seen and that had told his shame—­a guilty woman stealing by night from her lover’s door.  Not only that, either, for there was the almost certain knowledge that she had deceived him for years, and that while he had been fighting so hard to save her from what seemed but a show of marriage, she had been already lost to him for ever and ruined beyond all hope of honesty.