"No, you say right," cried Valentine la Niña, "it will indeed make no difference. For by these words--they are printed on my heart--you have condemned her; the spy's daughter to the knife, and yourself----"
"To the fires of the Inquisition?" demanded the Abbé John. "I am ready!"
"Nay, not so fast," said Valentine la Niña, "that were far too easy a death--too quick. You shall go to the galleys among the lowest criminals, your feet in the rotting wash of the bilge, lingering out a slow death-in-life--slow--very slow, the lash on your back and--no, no--I cannot believe this is your answer. Here, here is yet one chance. Surely I have not humbled myself only for this?"
The Abbé John answered nothing, and after a pause the girl drew herself up to her height, and spoke to him through her clenched teeth.
"You shall go to the galleys and pray--ah, you say you have never learned to pray, but you will--you will on Philip's galleys. They make good theologians there; they practise. You will pray in vain for the death that will not come. And I, when I wake in the night, will turn me and sleep the sweeter on my pillow for the thought of you chained to your oar, which you will never quit alive. Ah, I will teach you, Jean d'Albret of the house of Bourbon, cousin of kings, what it is to love the spy's daughter, and to despise me--me--Valentine la Niña, a daughter of the King of Spain!"
Mariana the Jesuit rose, pen in hand, to embrace his "niece" as she entered his bureau. There was a laughing twinkle in his eye, and all his comfortable little pink-and-white figure shook with mirth.
"Bravo--oh! bravo!" he cried, "never--never did I suppose our little Valentine half so clever. Why, you turned yonder boastful cockerel outside in. Ha, they teach us something of dissimulation in our seminaries, but we are children to you, the best of us--the whole Gesù might sit at your feet and take lessons. Even Philip himself--were it not for semi-paternal authority! Never was the thing they call love better acted. I declare it was a great moral lesson to listen to you. You made the folly of it so apparent--so abject!"
The girl was still pale. The rich glow of health, without the least colour in her cheeks, had disappeared. But the eyes of Valentine la Niña were dangerously bright.