For three days thereafter the convent saw the friar only in the celebration of the Mass. But on the morning of the fourth, he went straight from the sacristy to the parlour, and, despite the early hour, desired to see her Excellency.
“Lady,” he told her, “I have great news; news that will rejoice your heart.” She looked at him, and saw the feverish glitter in his sunken eyes, the hectic flush on his prominent cheek-bones. “Don Sebastian lives. I have seen him.”
A moment she stared at him as if she did not understand. Then she paled until her face became as white as the nun’s coil upon her brow; her breath came in a faint moan, she stiffened, and swayed upon her feet, and caught at the back of a prie-dieu to steady and save herself from falling. He saw that he had blundered by his abruptness, that he had failed to gauge the full depth of her feelings for the Hidden Prince, and for a moment feared that she would swoon under the shock of the news he had so recklessly delivered.
“What do you say? Oh, what do you say?” she moaned, her eyes half-closed.
He repeated the news in more measured, careful terms, exerting all the magnetism of his will to sustain her reeling senses. Gradually she quelled the storm of her emotions.
“And you say that you have seen him? Oh!” Once more the colour suffused her cheeks, and her eyes glowed, her expression became radiant. “Where is he?”
“Here. Here in Madrigal.”
“In Madrigal?” She was all amazement. “But why in Madrigal?”
“He was in Valladolid, and there heard that I—his sometime preacher and counsellor—was Vicar here at Santa Maria la Real. He came to seek me. He comes disguised, under the false name of Gabriel de Espinosa, and setting up as a pastry-cook until his term of penance shall be completed, and he shall be free to disclose himself once more to his impatiently awaiting people.”
It was bewildering, intoxicating news to her. It set her mind in turmoil, made of her soul a battle-ground for mad hope and dreadful fear. This dream-prince, who for four years had been the constant companion of her thoughts, whom her exalted, ardent, imaginative, starved Soul had come to love with a consuming passion, was a living reality near at hand, to be seen in the flesh by the eyes of her body. It was a thought that set her in an ecstasy of terror, so that she dared not ask Frey Miguel to bring Don Sebastian to her. But she plied him with questions, and so elicited from him a very circumstantial story.