“Ave Caesar!” he cried from the door.  “Hail, conqueror!  All hail, thou favoured of heaven, of man,—­and of the ladies!”

“The ladies too?” laughed Don John, probably amused by the dwarfs antics.  “Who told you that?”

“The cook, sir.  For as you rode up to the gate this afternoon a scullery maid saw you from the cellar grating and has been raving mad ever since, singing of the sun, moon, and undying love, until the kitchen is more like a mad-house than this house would be if the Day of Judgment came before or after Lent.”

“Do you fast in Lent, Adonis?”

“I fast rigidly three times a day, my lord conqueror,—­no, six, for I eat nothing either just before or just after my breakfast, my dinner, and my supper.  No monk can do better than that, for at those times I eat nothing at all.”

“If you said your prayers as often as you fast, you would be in a good way,” observed Don John.

“I do, sir.  I say a short grace before and after eating.  Why have you come to Madrid, my lord?  Do you not know that Madrid is the worst, the wickedest, the dirtiest, vilest, and most damnable habitation devised by man for the corruption of humanity?  Especially in the month of November?  Has your lordship any reasonable reason for this unreason of coming here, when the streets are full of mud, and men’s hearts are packed like saddle-bags with all the sins they have accumulated since Easter and mean to unload at Christmas?  Even your old friends are shocked to see so young and honest a prince in such a place!”

“My old friends?  Who?”

“I saw Saint John the Conqueror graciously wave his hand to a most highly respectable old nobleman this afternoon, and the nobleman was so much shocked that he could not stir an arm to return the salutation!  His legs must have done something, though, for he seemed to kick his own horse up from the ground under him.  The shock must have been terrible.  As for me, I laughed aloud, which made both the old nobleman and Don Julius Caesar of Austria exceedingly angry.  Get before me, Don Fadrique!  I am afraid of the terror of the Moors,—­and no shame to me either!  A poor dwarf, against a man who tears armies to shreds,—­and sends scullery maids into hysterics!  What is a poor crippled jester compared with a powerful scullery maid or an army of heathen Moriscoes?  Give me that sword, Fadrique, or I am a dead man!”

But Don John was laughing good-naturedly.

“So it was you, Adonis?  I might have-known your voice, I should think.”

“No one ever knows my voice, sir.  It is not a voice, it is a freak of grammar.  It is masculine, feminine, and neuter in gender, singular by nature, and generally accusative, and it is optative in mood and full of acute accents.  If you can find such another voice in creation, sir, I will forfeit mine in the King’s councils.”

Adonis laughed now, and Dolores remembered the laughter she had heard from the window.