penitence for that unnatural act that she desired her skull to be
exhibited as I describe. Into the story of Susan's daughter I
have woven that of another New-Christian girl, who, like the
Hermosa Fembra, her taken a Castilian lover--in this case a youth
of the house of Guzman. This youth was driven into concealment in
circumstances more or less as I describe them. He overheard the
judaizing of several New-Christians there assembled, and bore
word of it at once to Ojeda. The two episodes were separated in
fact by an interval of three years, and the first afforded Ojeda
a strong argument for the institution of the Holy Office in
Seville. Between the two there are many points of contact, and
each supplies what the other lacks to make an interesting
narrative having for background the introduction of the
Inquisition to Castile. The denouement I supply is entirely
fictitious, and the introduction of Torquemada is quite
arbitrary. Ojeda was the inquisitor who dealt with both cases.
But if there I stray into fiction, at least I claim to have
sketched a faithful portrait of the Grand Inquisitor as I know
him from fairly exhaustive researches into his life and times.

The story of the False Demetrius is here related from the point
of view of my adopted solution of what is generally regarded as a
historical mystery. The mystery lies, of course, in the man's
identity. He has been held by some to have been the unfrocked
monk, Grishka Otropiev, by others to have been a son of Stephen
Bathory, King of Poland. I am not aware that the theory that he
was both at one and the same time has ever been put forward, and
whilst admitting that it is speculative, yet I claim that no
other would appear so aptly to fit all the known facts of his
career or to shed light upon its mysteries.