“I was thinking about Spain,” answered Rafael, who all this time had been glowering at the globe. “How did we lose what was ours? Were there no more great kings after Ferdinand?”
“Yes,” said Don Carlos. “Spain has had strong kings and weak kings, wise and foolish, but even the best of them blundered at times. Ferdinand and Isabella themselves made mistakes. So some thirty years ago, when I was a boy, Spain tried to be a republic and get on without any king at all, but she did not prosper so.”
“King Alfonsito is not much older than I am,” murmured Rafael, with a wondering look in his great dark eyes.
“And a gallant child it is! A right royal child!” chirruped the Geography Gentleman.
“God bless him and grant him a long and righteous reign!” added Don Carlos, so solemnly that Pilarica clasped her hands as if she were saying her prayers.
“His father, King Alfonso XII, had a great heart,” the Geography Gentleman said musingly, “but his heart was wrung to breaking by sore troubles. I was in Madrid when the young Queen Mercedes died. Woe is me! What a grief was his!”
“Pilarica knows a song about that,” observed Rafael.
“Ah, to be sure! Spanish babies all over the Peninsula dance to that sorrow,” nodded the Geography Gentleman. “Come back into the patio, where the fountain will sing with her, and let us have it.”
So in the fragrant air of the patio, where an awning had been drawn to shut off the direct rays of the sun, Pilarica, dancing with strange, slow movements of feet and hands, sang childhood’s lament for the girl-queen.
“ ‘Whither away, young King Alfonso?
(Oh, for pity!) Whither away?’
‘I go seeking my queen Mercedes,
For I have not seen her since yesterday.’