dearly had tried to win him from her. He was hers in death, and should
be hers for ever, and no one should ever know. It did not matter that he
had taken her for another, his kisses were her own. Once only had a
man's lips, not her father's, touched her cheek, and they had been the
lips of the fairest, and best, and bravest man in the world, her idol
and her earthly god. He might die now, and she would follow him, and in
the world beyond God would make it right somehow, and he, and she, and
her sister would all be but one loving soul for ever and ever. There was
no reasoning in all that--it was but the flash of wild thoughts that all
seemed certainties.

But Don John of Austria was neither dead nor dying. His brother's sword
had pierced his doublet and run through the outer flesh beneath his left
arm, as he stood sideways with his right thrust forward. The wound was a
mere scratch, as soldiers count wounds, and though the young blood had
followed quickly, it had now ceased to flow. It was the fall that had
hurt him, not the stab. The carpet had slipped from under his feet, and
he had fallen backwards to his full length, as a man falls on ice, and
his head had struck the marble floor so violently that he had lain half
an hour almost in a swoon, like a dead man at first, with neither breath
nor beating of the heart to give a sign of life, till after Dolores had
left him; and then he had sighed back to consciousness by very slow
degrees, because no one was there to help him, to raise his head a few
inches from the floor, to dash a little cold water into his face.

He stirred uneasily now, and moved his hands again, and his eyes opened
wide. Inez felt the slight motion and heard his regular breathing, and
an instinct told her that he was conscious, and not in a dream as he had
been when he had kissed her.