"Not this one? I put on this court dress before I got out of the room in which you had locked me up. Inez helped me--I pretended that I was she, and wore her cloak, and slipped away, and I have not been back again. You did not see me."
Mendoza passed his hand over his eyes and drew back from her. If what she said were true, the strongest link was gone from the chain of facts by which he had argued so much sorrow and shame. Forgetting himself and his own near fate, he looked at the court dress she wore, and a mere glance convinced him that it was not the one he had seen.
"But--" he was suddenly confused--"but why did you need to disguise yourself? I left the Princess of Eboli with you, and I gave her permission to take you away to stay with her. You needed no disguise."
"I never saw her. She must have found Inez in the room. I was gone long before that."
"Gone--where?" Mendoza was fast losing the thread of it all--in his confusion of ideas he grasped the clue of his chief sorrow, which was far beyond any thought for himself. "But if you are innocent--pray God you may be, as you say--how is it possible--oh, no! I cannot believe it--I cannot! No woman could do that--no innocent girl could stand out before a multitude of men and women, and say what you said--"
"I hoped to save your life. I had the strength. I did it."
Her clear grey eyes looked into his, and his doubt began to break away before the truth.
"Make me believe it!" he cried, his voice breaking. "Oh, God! Make me believe it before I die!"
"It is true," she cried, in a low, strong voice that carried belief to his breast in spite of such reasoning as still had some power over him. "It is true, and you shall believe it; and if you will not, the man you have killed, the man I loved and trusted, the dead man who knows the whole truth as I know it, will come back from the dead to prove it true--for I swear it upon his soul in heaven, and upon yours and mine that will not be long on earth--as I will swear it in the hour of your death and mine, since we must die!"
He could not take his eyes from hers that held him, and suddenly in the pure depths he seemed to see her soul facing him without fear, and he knew that what she said was true, and his tortured heart leapt up at the good certainty.