small town on the frontier between the two countries, and the grand
public entry into Madrid with the customary celebration of high
mass at the Church of La Atocha, and a more than usually solemn
auto-da-fe, in which nearly three hundred heretics, amongst whom
were many Englishmen, had been delivered over to the secular arm to
be burned.

Certainly he had loved her madly, and to the ruin, many thought, of
his country, then at war with England for the possession of the
empire of the New World. He had hardly ever permitted her to be
out of his sight; for her, he had forgotten, or seemed to have
forgotten, all grave affairs of State; and, with that terrible
blindness that passion brings upon its servants, he had failed to
notice that the elaborate ceremonies by which he sought to please
her did but aggravate the strange malady from which she suffered.
When she died he was, for a time, like one bereft of reason.
Indeed, there is no doubt but that he would have formally abdicated
and retired to the great Trappist monastery at Granada, of which he
was already titular Prior, had he not been afraid to leave the
little Infanta at the mercy of his brother, whose cruelty, even in
Spain, was notorious, and who was suspected by many of having
caused the Queen's death by means of a pair of poisoned gloves that
he had presented to her on the occasion of her visiting his castle
in Aragon. Even after the expiration of the three years of public
mourning that he had ordained throughout his whole dominions by
royal edict, he would never suffer his ministers to speak about any
new alliance, and when the Emperor himself sent to him, and offered
him the hand of the lovely Archduchess of Bohemia, his niece, in
marriage, he bade the ambassadors tell their master that the King
of Spain was already wedded to Sorrow, and that though she was but