The Crown Prince sat in the royal box and swung his legs. This was hardly princely, but the royal legs did not quite reach the floor from the high crimson-velvet seat of his chair.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto was bored. His royal robes, consisting of a pair of blue serge trousers, a short Eton jacket, and a stiff, rolling collar of white linen, irked him.

He had been brought to the Opera House under a misapprehension. His aunt, the Archduchess Annunciata, had strongly advocated “The Flying Dutchman,” and his English governess, Miss Braithwaite, had read him some inspiring literature about it. So here he was, and the Flying Dutchman was not ghostly at all, nor did it fly. It was, from the royal box, only too plainly a ship which had length and height, without thickness. And instead of flying, after dreary aeons of singing, it was moved off on creaky rollers by men whose shadows were thrown grotesquely on the sea backing.

The orchestra, assisted by a bass solo and intermittent thunder in the wings, was making a deafening din. One of the shadows on the sea backing took out its handkerchief and wiped its nose.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto looked across at the other royal box, and caught his Cousin Hedwig’s eye. She also had seen the handkerchief; she took out her own scrap of linen, and mimicked the shadow. Then, Her Royal Highness the Archduchess Annunciata being occupied with the storm, she winked across at Prince Ferdinand William Otto.

In the opposite box were his two cousins, the Princesses Hedwig and Hilda, attended by Hedwig’s lady in waiting. When a princess of the Court becomes seventeen, she drops governesses and takes to ladies in waiting. Hedwig was eighteen. The Crown Prince liked Hedwig better than Hilda. Although she had been introduced formally to the Court at the Christmas-Eve ball, and had been duly presented by her grandfather, the King, with the usual string of pearls and her own carriage with the spokes of the wheels gilded halfway, only the King and Prince Ferdinand William Otto had all-gold wheels,—she still ran off now and then to have tea with the Crown Prince and Miss Braithwaite in the schoolroom at the Palace; and she could eat a great deal of bread-and-butter.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto winked back at the Princess Hedwig. And just then—“Listen, Otto,” said the Archduchess, leaning forward. “The ‘Spinning Song’—is it not exquisite?”

“They are only pretending to spin,” remarked Prince Ferdinand William Otto.

Nevertheless he listened obediently. He rather liked it. They had not fooled him at all. They were not really spinning,—any one could see that, but they were sticking very closely to their business of each outsinging the other, and collectively of drowning out the orchestra.

The spinning chorus was followed by long and tiresome solos. The Crown Prince yawned again, although it was but the middle of the afternoon. Catching Hedwig’s eye, he ran his fingers up through his thick yellow hair and grinned. Hedwig blushed. She had confided to him once, while they were walking in the garden at the summer palace, that, she was thinking of being in love with a young lieutenant who was attached to the King’s suite. The Prince who was called Otto, for short, by the family, because he actually had eleven names—the Prince had been much interested. For some time afterward he had bothered Miss Braithwaite to define being in love, but he had had no really satisfactory answer.

In pursuance of his quest for information, he had grown quite friendly with the young officer, whose name was Larisch, and had finally asked to have him ride with him at the royal riding-school. The grim old King had granted the request, but it had been quite fruitless so far after all. Lieutenant Larisch only grew quite red as to the ears, when love was mentioned, although he appeared not unwilling to hear Hedwig’s name.

The Crown Prince had developed a strong liking for the young officer. He assured Hedwig one time when she came to tea that when he was king he would see that she married the lieutenant. But Hedwig was much distressed.

“I don’t want him that way,” she said. “Anyhow, I shall probably have to marry some wretch with ears that stick out and a bad temper. I dare say he’s selected already. As to Lieutenant Larisch, I’m sure he’s in love with Hilda. You should see the way he stares at her.”

“Pish!” said Prince Ferdinand William Otto over his cup. “Hilda is not as pretty as you are. And Nikky and I talk about you frequently.”

“Nikky” was the officer. The Crown Prince was very informal with the people he liked.

“Good gracious!” exclaimed the Princess Hedwig, coloring. “And what do you say?”

Miss Braithwaite having left the room, Prince Ferdinand William Otto took another lump of sugar. “Say? Oh, not much, you know. He asks how you are, and I tell him you are well, and that you ate thirteen pieces of bread at tea, or whatever it may have been. The day Miss Braithwaite had the toothache, and you and I ate the fruit-cake her sister had sent from England, he was very anxious. He said we both deserved to be ill.”

The Princess Hedwig had been blushing uncomfortably, but now she paled. “He dared to say that?” she stormed. “He dared!” And she had picked up her muff and gone out in a fine temper.

Only—and this was curious—by the next day she had forgiven the lieutenant, and was angry at Ferdinand William Otto. Women are very strange.

So now Ferdinand William Otto ran his fingers through his fair hair; which was a favorite gesture of the lieutenant’s, and Hedwig blushed. After that she refused to look across at him, but sat staring fixedly at the stage, where Frau Hugli, in a short skirt, a black velvet bodice, and a white apron, with two yellow braids over her shoulders, was listening with all the coyness of forty years and six children at home to the love-making of a man in a false black beard.

The Archduchess, sitting well back, was nodding. Just outside the royal box, on the red-velvet sofa, General Mettlich, who was the Chancellor, and had come because he had been invited and stayed outside because he said he liked to hear music, not see it, was sound asleep. His martial bosom, with its gold braid, was rising and falling peacefully. Beside him lay the Prince’s crown, a small black derby hat.

The Princess Hilda looked across, and smiled and nodded at Ferdinand William Otto. Then she went back to the music; she held the score in her hand and followed it note by note. She was studying music, and her mother, who was the Archduchess, was watching her. But now and then, when her mother’s eyes were glued to the stage, Hilda stole a glance at the upper balconies where impecunious young officers leaned over the rail and gazed at her respectfully.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto considered it all very wearisome. If one could only wander around the corridor or buy a sandwich from the stand at the foot of the great staircase—or, better still, if one could only get to the street, alone, and purchase one of the fig women that Miss Braithwaite so despised! The Crown Prince felt in his pocket, where his week’s allowance of pocket-money lay comfortably untouched.

The Archduchess, shielded by the velvet hangings with the royal arms on them, was now quite comfortably asleep. From the corridor came sounds indicating that the Chancellor preferred making noises to listening to them. There were signs on the stage that Frau Hugli, braids, six children, and all, was about to go into the arms of the man with the false beard.

The Crown Prince meditated. He could go out quickly, and be back before they knew it. Even if he only wandered about the corridor, it would stretch his short legs. And outside it was a fine day. It looked already like spring.

With the trepidation of a canary who finds his cage door open, and, hopping to the threshold, surveys the world before venturing to explore it, Prince Ferdinand William Otto rose to his feet, tiptoed past the Archduchess Annunciata, who did not move, and looked around him from the doorway.

The Chancellor slept. In the royal dressing-room behind the box a lady in waiting was sitting and crocheting. She did not care for opera. A maid was spreading the royal ladies’ wraps before the fire. The princesses had shed their furred carriage boots just inside the door. They were in a row, very small and dainty.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto picked up his hat and concealed it by his side. Then nonchalantly, as if to stretch his legs by walking ten feet up the corridor and back, he passed the dressing-room door. Another moment, and he was out of sight around a bend of the passageway, and before him lay liberty.

Not quite! At the top of the private staircase reserved for the royal family a guard commonly stood. He had moved a few feet from his post, however, and was watching the stage through the half-open door of a private loge. His rifle, with its fixed bayonet, leaned against the stair-rail.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto passed behind him with outward calmness. At the top of the public staircase, however, he hesitated. Here, everywhere, were brass-buttoned officials of the Opera House. A garderobe woman stared at him curiously. There was a noise from the house, too,—a sound of clapping hands and “bravos.” The little Prince looked at the woman with appeal in his eyes. Then, with his heart thumping, he ran past her, down the white marble staircase, to where the great doors promised liberty.

Olga, the wardrobe woman, came out from behind her counter, and stood looking down the marble staircase after the small flying figure.

“Blessed Saints!” she said, wondering. “How much that child resembled His Royal Highness!”

The old soldier who rented opera glasses at the second landing, and who had left a leg in Bosnia, leaned over the railing. “Look at that!” he exclaimed. “He will break a leg, the young rascal! Once I could have—but there, he is safe! The good God watches over fools and children.”

“It looked like the little Prince,” said the wardrobe woman. “I have seen him often—he has the same bright hair.”

But the opera-glass man was not listening. He had drawn a long sausage from one pocket and a roll from the other, and now, retiring to a far window, he stood placidly eating—a bite of sausage, a bite of bread. His mind was in Bosnia, with his leg. And because old Adelbert’s mind was in Bosnia, and because one hears with the mind, and not with the ear, he did not hear the sharp question of the sentry who ran down the stairs and paused for a second at the cloak-room. Well for Olga, too, that old Adelbert did not hear her reply.

“He has not passed here,” she said, with wide and honest eyes; but with an ear toward old Adelbert. “An old gentleman came a moment ago and got a sandwich, which he had left in his overcoat. Perhaps this is whom you are seeking?”

The sentry cursed, and ran down the staircase, the nails in his shoes striking sharply on the marble.

At the window, old Adelbert cut off another slice of sausage with his pocket-knife and sauntered back to his table of opera glasses at the angle of the balustrade. The hurrying figure of the sentry below caught his eye. “Another fool!” he grumbled, looking down. “One would think new legs grew in place of old ones, like the claws of the sea-creatures!”

But Olga of the cloak-room leaned over her checks, with her lips curved up in a smile. “The little one!” she thought. “And such courage! He will make a great king! Let him have his prank like the other children, and—God bless him and keep him!”

The Crown Prince was just a trifle dazzled by the brilliance of his success. He paused for one breathless moment under the porte-cochere of the opera house; then he took a long breath and turned to the left. For he knew that at the right, just around the corner; were the royal carriages, with his own drawn up before the door, and Beppo and Hans erect on the box, their haughty noses red in the wind, for the early spring air was biting.

So he turned to the left, and was at once swallowed up in the street crowd. It seemed very strange to him. Not that he was unaccustomed to crowds. Had he not, that very Christmas, gone shopping in the city, accompanied only by one of his tutors and Miss Braithwaite, and bought for his grandfather, the King, a burnt-wood box, which might hold either neckties or gloves, and for his cousins silver photograph frames?

But this was different, and for a rather peculiar reason. Prince Ferdinand William Otto had never seen the back of a crowd! The public was always lined up, facing him, smiling and bowing and God-blessing him. Small wonder he thought of most of his future subjects as being much like the ship in the opera, meant only to be viewed from the front. Also, it was surprising to see how stiff and straight their backs were. Prince Ferdinand William Otto had never known that backs could be so rigid. Those with which he was familiar had a way of drooping forward from the middle of the spine up. It was most interesting.

The next hour was full of remarkable things. For one, he dodged behind a street-car and was almost run over by a taxicab. The policeman on the corner came out, and taking Ferdinand William Otto by the shoulder, gave him a talking-to and a shaking. Ferdinand William Otto was furious, but policy kept him silent; which proves conclusively that the Crown Prince had not only initiative—witness his flight—but self-control and diplomacy. Lucky country, to have in prospect such a king!

But even royalty has its weaknesses. At the next corner Ferdinand William Otto stopped and invested part of his allowance in the forbidden fig lady, with arms and legs of dates, and eyes of cloves. He had wanted one of these ever since he could remember, but Miss Braithwaite had sternly refused to authorize the purchase. In fact, she had had one of the dates placed under a microscope, and had shown His Royal Highness a number of interesting and highly active creatures who made their homes therein.

His Royal Highness recalled all this with great distinctness, and, immediately dismissing it from his mind, ate the legs and arms of the fig woman with enjoyment. Which—not the eating of the legs and arms, of course, but to be able to dismiss what is unpleasant—is another highly desirable royal trait.

So far his movements had been swift and entirely objective. But success rather went to his head. He had never been out alone before. Even at the summer palace there were always tutors, or Miss Braithwaite, or an aide-de-camp, or something. He hesitated, took out his small handkerchief, dusted his shoes with it, and then wiped his face. Behind was the Opera, looming and gray. Ahead was—the park.

Note the long allee between rows of trees trimmed to resemble walls of green in summer, and curiously distorted skeletons in winter; note the coffee-houses, where young officers in uniforms sat under the trees, reading the papers, and rising to bow with great clanking and much ceremony as a gold-wheeled carriage or a pretty girl went by.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto had the fulfillment of a great desire in his small, active mind. This was nothing less than a ride on the American scenic railroad, which had secured a concession in a far corner of the park. Hedwig’s lieutenant had described it to him—how one was taken in a small car to a dizzy height, and then turned loose on a track which dropped giddily and rose again, which hurled one through sheet-iron tunnels of incredible blackness, thrust one out over a gorge, whirled one in mad curves around corners of precipitous heights, and finally landed one, panting, breathless, shocked, and reeling; but safe, at the very platform where one had purchased one’s ticket three eternities, which were only minutes, before.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto had put this proposition, like the fig woman, to Miss Braithwaite. Miss Braithwaite replied with the sad history of an English child who had clutched at his cap during a crucial moment on a similar track at the Crystal Palace in London.

“When they picked him up,” she finished, “every bone in his body was broken.”

“Every bone?”

“Every bone,” said Miss Braithwaite solemnly.

“The little ones in his ears, and all?”

“Every one,” said Miss Braithwaite, refusing to weaken.

The Crown Prince had pondered. “He must have felt like jelly,” he remarked, and Miss Braithwaite had dropped the subject.

So now, with freedom and his week’s allowance, except the outlay for the fig woman, in his pocket, Prince Ferdinand William Otto started for the Land of Desire. The allee was almost deserted. It was the sacred hour of coffee. The terraces were empty, but from the coffee-houses along the drive there came a cheerful rattle of cups, a hum of conversation.

As the early spring twilight fell, the gas-lamps along the allee, always burning, made a twin row of pale stars ahead. At the end, even as the wanderer gazed, he saw myriads of tiny red, white, and blue lights, rising high in the air, outlining the crags and peaks of the sheet-iron mountain which was his destination. The Land of Desire was very near!

There came to his ears, too, the occasional rumble that told of some palpitating soul being at that moment hurled and twisted and joyously thrilled, as per the lieutenant’s description.

Now it is a strange thing, but true, that one does not reach the Land of Desire alone; because the half of pleasure is the sharing of it with someone else, and the Land of Desire, alone, is not the Land of Desire at all. Quite suddenly, Prince Ferdinand William Otto discovered that he was lonely. He sat down on the curb under the gas-lamp and ate the fig woman’s head, taking out the cloves, because he did not like cloves. At that moment there was a soft whirring off to one side of him, and a yellow bird, rising and failing erratically on the breeze, careened suddenly and fell at his feet.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto bent down and picked it up. It was a small toy aeroplane, with yellow silk planes, guy-ropes of waxed thread, and a wooden rudder, its motive power vested in a tightly twisted rubber. One of the wings was bent. Ferdinand William Otto straightened it, and looked around for the owner.

A small boy was standing under the next gas-lamp. “Gee!” he said in English. “Did you see it go that time?”

Prince Ferdinand William Otto eyed the stranger. He was about his own age, and was dressed in a short pair of corduroy trousers, much bloomed at the knee, a pair of yellow Russia-leather shoes that reached well to his calves, and, over all, a shaggy white sweater, rolling almost to his chin. On the very back of his head he had the smallest cap that Prince Ferdinand William Otto had ever seen.

Now, this was exactly the way in which the Crown Prince had always wished to dress. He was suddenly conscious of the long trousers on his own small legs, of the ignominy of his tailless Eton jacket and stiff, rolling collar, of the crowning disgrace of his derby hat. But the lonely feeling had gone from him.

“This is the best time for flying,” he said, in his perfect English. “All the exhibition flights are at sundown.”

The boy walked slowly over and stood looking down at him. “You ought to see it fly from the top of Pike’s Peak!” he remarked. He had caught sight of the despised derby, and his eyes widened, but with instinctive good-breeding he ignored it. “That’s Pike’s Peak up there.”

He indicated the very top of the Land of Desire. The Prince stared up.

“How does one get up?” he queried.

“Ladders. My father’s the manager. He lets me up sometimes.”

Prince Ferdinand William Otto stared with new awe at the boy. He found the fact much more remarkable than if the stranger had stated that his father was the King of England. Kings were, as you may say, directly in Prince Ferdinand William Otto’s line, but scenic railroads—

“I had thought of taking a journey on it,” he said, after a second’s reflection. “Do you think your father will sell me a ticket?”

“Billy Grimm will. I’ll go with you.”

The Prince rose with alacrity. Then he stopped. He must, of course, ask the strange boy to be his guest. But two tickets! Perhaps his allowance was not sufficient.

“I must see first how much it costs,” he said with dignity.

The other boy laughed. “Oh, gee! You come with me. It won’t cost anything,” he said, and led the way toward the towering lights.

For Bobby Thorpe to bring a small boy to ride with him was an everyday affair. Billy Grimm, at the ticket-window, hardly glanced at the boy who stood, trembling with anticipation, in the shadow of the booth.

The car came, and they climbed in. Perhaps, as they moved off, Prince Ferdinand William Otto had a qualm, occasioned by the remembrance of the English child who had met an untimely end; but if he did, he pluckily hid it.

“Put your lid on the floor of the car,” said Bobby Thorpe’ depositing his own atom there. “Father says, if you do that; you’re perfectly safe.”

Prince Ferdinand William Otto divined that this referred to his hat, and drew a small breath of relief. And then they were off, up an endless, clicking roadway, where at the top the car hung for a breathless second over the gulf below; then, fairly launched, out on a trestle, with the city far beneath them, and only the red, white, and blue lights for company; and into a tunnel, filled with roaring noises and swift moving shadows. Then came the end of all things a flying leap down, a heart-breaking, delirious thrill, an upward sweep just as the strain was too great for endurance.

“Isn’t it bully?” shouted the American boy against the onrush of the wind.

“Fine!” shrieked His Royal Highness, and braced himself for another dip into the gulf.

Above the roaring of the wind in their ears, neither child had heard the flying feet of a dozen horses coming down the allee. They never knew that a hatless young lieutenant, white-lipped with fear, had checked his horse to its haunches at the ticket-booth, and demanded to know who was in the Land of Desire.

“Only the son of the manager, and a boy friend of his,” replied Billy Grimm, in what he called the lingo of the country. “What’s wrong? Lost anybody?”

But Hedwig’s lieutenant had wheeled his horse without a word, and, jumping him aver the hedge of the allee, was off in a despairing search of the outskirts of the park, followed by his cavalrymen.

As the last horse leaped the hedge and disappeared, the car came to a stop at the platform. Quivering, Prince Ferdinand William Otto reached down for the despised hat.

“Would you like to go around again?” asked Bobby, quite casually.

His Highness gasped with joy. “If—if you would be so kind!” he said.

And at the lordly wave of Bobby’s hand, the car moved on.

At eight o’clock that evening the Crown Prince Ferdinand William Otto approached the Palace through the public square. He approached it slowly, for two reasons. First, he did not want to go back. Second, he was rather frightened. He had an idea that they would be disagreeable.

There seemed to be a great deal going on at the palace. Carriages were rolling in under the stone archway and, having discharged their contents, mostly gentlemen in uniform, were moving off with a thundering of hoofs that reechoed from the vaulted roof of the entrance. All the lights were on in the wing where his grandfather, the King, lived alone. As his grandfather hated lights, and went to bed early, Prince Ferdinand William Otto was slightly puzzled.

He stood in the square and waited for a chance to slip in unobserved.

He was very dirty. His august face was streaked with soot, and his august hands likewise. His small derby hat was carefully placed on the very back of his head at the angle of the American boy’s cap. As his collar had scratched his neck, he had, at Bobby’s suggestion, taken it off and rolled it up. He decided, as he waited in the square, to put it on again. Miss Braithwaite was very peculiar about collars.

Came a lull in the line of carriages. Prince Ferdinand William Otto took a long breath and started forward. As he advanced he stuck his hands in his pockets and swaggered a trifle. It was, as nearly as possible, an exact imitation of Bobby Thorpe’s walk. And to keep up his courage, he quoted that young gentleman’s farewell speech to himself: “What d’ you care? They won’t eat you, will they?”

At the entrance to the archway stood two sentries. They stood as if they were carved out of wood. Only their eyes moved. And within, in the court around which the Palace was built, were the King’s bodyguards. Mostly they sat on a long bench and exchanged conversation, while one of them paced back and forth, his gun over his shoulder, in front of them. Prince Ferdinand William Otto knew them all. More than once he had secured cigarettes from Lieutenant Larisch and dropped them from one of his windows, which were just overhead. They would look straight ahead and not see them, until the officer’s back was turned. Then one would be lighted and passed along the line. Each man would take one puff and pass it on behind his back. It was great fun.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto stood in the shadows and glanced across. The sentries stood like wooden men, but something was wrong in the courtyard inside. The guards were all standing, and there seemed to be a great many of them. And just as he had made up his mind to take the plunge, so to speak, a part of his own regiment of cavalry came out from the courtyard with a thundering of hoofs, wheeled at the street, and clattered off.

Very unusual, all of it.

The Crown Prince Ferdinand William Otto felt in his pocket for his handkerchief, and, moistening a corner with his tongue, wiped his face. Then he wiped his shoes. Then, with his hands in his trousers pockets, he sauntered into the light.

Now sentries are trained to be impassive. The model of a sentry is a wooden soldier. A really good sentry does not sneeze or cough on duty. Did any one ever see a sentry, for instance, wipe his nose? Or twirl his thumbs? Or buy a newspaper? Certainly not.

Therefore the two sentries made no sign when they saw Ferdinand William Otto approaching. But one of them forgot to bring his musket to salute. He crossed himself instead. And something strained around the other sentry’s lower jaw suddenly relaxed into a smile as His Royal Highness drew a hand from its refuge and saluted. He glanced first at one, then at the other, rather sheepishly, hesitated between them, clapped his hat on more securely, and marched in.

“The young rascal!” said the second sentry to himself. And by turning his head slightly—for a sentry learns to see all around like a horse, without twisting his neck—he watched the runaway into the palace.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto went up the stone staircase. Here and there he passed guards who stared and saluted. Had he not been obsessed with the vision of Miss Braithwaite, he would have known that relief followed in his wake. Messengers clattered down the staircase to the courtyard. Other messengers, breathless and eager, flew to that lighted wing where the Council sat, and where the old King, propped up in bed, waited and fought terror.

The Archduchess Annunciata was with her father. Across the corridor the Council debated in low tones.

“Tell me again,” said the King. “How in God’s name could it have happened? In daylight, and with all of you there!”

“I have told you all I know,” said the Archduchess impatiently. “One moment he was there. Hedwig and he were making gestures, and I reproved him. The next he was gone. Hedwig saw him get up and go out. She thought—”

“Send for Hedwig.”

“She has retired. She was devoted to him, and—”

“Send for her,” said the King shortly.

The Archduchess Annunciata went out. The old King lay back, and his eyes, weary with many years of ruling, of disappointments and bitterness, roved the room. They came to rest at last on the photograph of a young man, which stood on his bedside, table.

He was a very young man, in a uniform. He was boyish, and smiling. There was a dog beside him, and its head was on his knee. Wherever one stood in the room, the eyes of the photograph gazed at one. The King knew this, and because he was quite old, and because there were few people to whom a king dares to speak his inmost thoughts, he frequently spoke to the photograph.

The older he grew, the more he felt, sometimes, as though it knew what he said. He had begun to think that death, after all, is not the end, but only the beginning of things. This rather worried him, too, at times. What he wanted was to lay things down, not to take them up.

“If they’ve got him,” he said to the picture, “it is out of my hands, and into yours, my boy.”

Much of his life had been spent in waiting, in waiting for a son, in waiting for that son to grow to be a man, in waiting while that son in his turn loved and married and begot a man-child, in waiting, when that son had died a violent death, for the time when his tired hands could relinquish the scepter to his grandchild.

He folded his old hands and waited. From across the corridor came the low tones of the Council. A silent group of his gentlemen stood in the vestibule outside the door. The King lay on his bed and waited.

Quite suddenly the door opened. The old man turned his head. Just inside stood a very dirty small boy.

The Crown Prince Ferdinand William Otto was most terribly frightened. Everything was at sixes and sevens. Miss Braithwaite had been crying her head off, and on seeing him had fallen in a faint. Not that he thought it was a real faint. He had unmistakably seen her eyelids quiver. And when she came to she had ordered him no supper, and four pages of German translation, and to go to bed at seven o’clock instead of seven-thirty for a week. All the time crying, too. And then she had sent him to his grandfather, and taken aromatic ammonia.

His grandfather said nothing, but looked at him.

“Here—here I am, sir,” said the Crown Prince from the door.

The King drew a long breath. But the silence persisted. Prince Ferdinand William Otto furtively rubbed a dusty shoe against the back of a trousers leg.

“I’m afraid I’m not very neat, sir,” said Prince Ferdinand William Otto, and took a step forward. Until his grandfather commanded him, he could not advance into the room.

“Come here,” said the King.

He went to the side of the bed.

“Where have you been?”

“I’m afraid—I ran away, sir.”

“Why?”

Prince Ferdinand William Otto considered. It was rather an awful moment. “I don’t exactly know. I just thought I would.”

You see, it was really extremely difficult. To say that he was tired of things as they were would sound ungrateful. Would, indeed, be most impolite. And then, exactly why had he run away?

“Suppose,” said the King, “you draw up a chair and tell me about it. We’d better talk it over, I think.”

His Royal Highness drew up a chair, and sat on it. His feet not reaching the floor, he hooked them around the chair-rung. This was permissible because, first, the King could not see them from his bed. Second, it kept his knees from shaking.

“Probably you are aware,” said the King, “that you have alarmed a great many people.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t think—”

“A prince’s duty is to think.”

“Although,” observed His Royal Highness, “I don’t really believe Miss Braithwaite fainted. She may have thought she fainted, but her eyelids moved.”

“Where did you go?”

“To the park, sir. I—I thought I’d like to see the park by myself.”

“Go on.”

“It’s very hard to enjoy things with Miss Braithwaite, sir. She does not really enjoy the things I like. Nikky and I—”

“By ‘Nikky’ you mean Lieutenant Larisch?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go on.”

“We like the same things, sir—the Pike’s-Peak-or-Bust, and all that.”

The King raised himself on his elbow. “What was that?” he demanded.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto blushed, and explained. It was Bobby’s name for the peak at the top of the Scenic Railway. He had been on the railway. He had been—his enthusiasm carried him away. His cheeks flushed. He sat forward on the edge of his chair, and gesticulated. He had never had such a good time in his life.

“I was awfully happy, sir,” he ended. “It feels like flying, only safer. And the lights are pretty. It’s like fairyland. There were two or three times when it seemed as if we’d turn over, or leap the track. But we didn’t.”

The King lay back and thought. More than anything in the world he loved this boy. But the occasion demanded a strong hand. “You were happy,” he said. “You were disobedient, you were causing grave anxiety and distress—and you were happy! The first duty of a prince is to his country. His first lesson is to obey laws. He must always obey certain laws. A king is but the servant of his people.”

“Yes, sir,” said Prince Ferdinand William Otto.

The old King’s voice was stern. “Some day you will be the King. You are being trained for that high office now. And yet you would set the example of insubordination, disobedience, and reckless disregard of the feelings of others.”

“Yes, sir,” said prince Ferdinand William Otto, feeling very small and ashamed.

“Not only that. You slipped away. You did not go openly. You sneaked off, like a thief. Are you proud of it?”

“No, sir.”

“I shall,” said the King, “require no promise from you. Promises are poor things to hold to. I leave this matter in your own hands, Otto. You will be punished by Miss Braithwaite, and for the next ten days you will not visit me. You may go now.”

Otto got off his chair. He was feeling exceedingly crushed. “Good-night, sir,” he said. And waited for his grandfather to extend his hand. But the old King lay looking straight ahead, with his mouth set in grim lines, and his hands folded over his breast.

At the door the Crown Prince turned and bowed. His grandfather’s eyes were fixed on the two gold eagles over the door, but the photograph on the table appeared to be smiling at him.

Until late that night General Mettlich and the King talked together. The King had been lifted from his bed and sat propped in a great chair. Above his shabby dressing-gown his face showed gaunt and old. In a straight chair facing him sat his old friend and Chancellor.

“What it has shown is not entirely bad,” said the King, after a pause. “The boy has initiative. And he made no attempt at evasion. He is essentially truthful.”

“What it has also shown, sire, is that no protection is enough. When I, who love the lad, and would—when I could sleep, and let him get away, as I did—”

“The truth is,” said the King, “we are both of us getting old.” He tapped with his gnarled fingers on the blanket that lay over his knees. “The truth is also,” he observed a moment later, “that the boy has very few pleasures. He is alone a great deal.”

General Mettlich raised his shaggy head. Many years of wearing a soldier’s cap had not injured his heavy gray hair. He had bristling eyebrows, white new, and a short, fighting mustache. When he was irritated, or disagreed with any one, his eyebrows came down and the mustache went up.

Many years of association with his king had given him the right to talk to him as man to man. They even quarreled now and then. It was a brave man who would quarrel with old Ferdinand II.

So now his eyebrows came down and his mustache went up. “How—alone, sire?”

“You do not regard that bigoted Englishwoman as a companion, do you?”

“He is attached to her.”

“I’m damned if I know why,” observed the old King. “She doesn’t appear to have a single human quality.”

Human quality! General Mettlich eyed his king with concern. Since when had the reigning family demanded human qualities in their governesses? “She is a thoughtful and conscientious woman, sire,” he said stiffly. It happened that he had selected her. “She does her duty. And as to the boy being lonely, he has no time to be lonely. His tutors—”

“How old is he?”

“Ten next month.”

The King said nothing for a time. Then—“It is hard,” he said at last, “for seventy-four to see with the eyes of ten. As for this afternoon—why in the name of a thousand devils did they take him to see the ‘Flying Dutchman’? I detest it.”

“Her Royal Highness—”

“Annunciata is a fool,” said His Majesty. Then dismissing his daughter with a gesture, “We don’t know how to raise our children here,” he said impatiently. “The English do better. And even the Germans—”

It is not etiquette to lower one’s eyebrows at a king, and glare. But General Mettlich did it. He was rather a poor subject. “The Germans have not our problem, sire,” he said, and stuck up his mustache.

“I’m not going to raise the boy a prisoner,” insisted the King stubbornly. Kings have to be very stubborn about things. So many people disapprove of the things they want to do.

Suddenly General Mettlich bent forward and placed a hand on the old man’s knee. “We shall do well, sire,” he said gravely, “to raise the boy at all.”

There was a short silence, which the King broke. “What is new?”

“We have broken up the University meetings, but I fancy they go on, in small groups. I was gratified, however, to observe that a group of students cheered His Royal Highness yesterday as he rode past the University buildings.”

“Socialism at twenty,” said the King, “is only a symptom of the unrest of early adolescence. Even Hubert”—he glanced at the picture—“was touched with it. He accused me, I recall, of being merely an accident, a sort of stumbling-block in the way of advanced thought!”

He smiled faintly. Then he sighed. “And the others?” he asked.

“The outlying districts are quiet. So, too, is the city. Too quiet, sire.”

“They are waiting, of course, for my death,” said the King quietly. “If only, you were twenty years younger than I am, it would be better.” He fixed the General with shrewd eyes. “What do those asses of doctors say about me?”

“With care, sire—”

“Come, now. This is no time for evasion.”

“Even at the best, sire—” He looked very ferocious, and cleared his throat. He was terribly ashamed that his voice was breaking.. “Even at the best, but of course they can only give an opinion—”

“Six months?”

“A year, sire.”

“And at the worst!” said the King, with a grim smile. Then; following his own line of, thought: “But the people love the boy, I think.”

“They do. It is for that reason, sire, that I advise particular caution.” He hesitated. Then, “Sire,” he said earnestly, “there is something of which I must speak. The Committee of Ten has organized again.”

Involuntarily the King glanced at the photograph on the table.

“Forgive me, sire, if I waken bitter memories. But I fear—”

“You fear!” said the King. “Since when have you taken to fearing?”

“Nevertheless,” maintained General Mettlich doggedly, “I fear. This quiet of the last few months alarms me. Dangerous dogs do not bark. I trust no one. The very air is full of sedition.”

The King twisted his blue-veined old hands together, but his voice was quiet. “But why?” he demanded, almost fretfully. “If the people are fond of the boy, and I think they are, to—to carry him off, or injure him, would hurt the cause. Even the Terrorists, in the name of a republic, can do nothing without the people.”

“The mob is a curious thing, sire. You have ruled with a strong hand. Our people know nothing but to obey the dominant voice. The boy out of the way, the prospect of the Princess Hedwig on the throne, a few demagogues in the public squares—it would be the end.”

The King leaned back and closed his eyes. His thin, arched nose looked pinched. His face was gray.

“All this,” he said, “means what? To make the boy a prisoner, to cut off his few pleasures, and even then, at any time—”

“Yes, sire,” said Mettlich doggedly. “At any time.”

Outside in the anteroom Lieutenant Nikky Larisch roused himself, yawned, and looked at his watch. It was after twelve, and he had had a hard day. He put a velvet cushion behind his head, and resolutely composed himself to slumber, a slumber in which were various rosy dreams, all centered about the Princess Hedwig. Dreams are beyond our control.

Therefore a young lieutenant running into debt on his pay may without presumption dream of a princess.

All through the Palace people were sleeping. Prince Ferdinand William Otto was asleep, and riding again the little car in the Land of Delight. So that, turning a corner sharply, he almost fell out of bed.

On the other side of the city the little American boy was asleep also. At that exact time he was being tucked up by an entirely efficient and placid-eyed American mother, who felt under his head to see that his ear was not turned forward. She liked close-fitting ears.

Nobody, naturally, was tucking up Prince Ferdinand William Otto. Or attending to his ears. But, of course, there were sentries outside his door, and a valet de chambre to be rung for, and a number of embroidered eagles scattered about on the curtains and things, and a country surrounding him which would one day be his, unless—

“At any time,” said General Mettlich, and was grimly silent.

It was really no time for such a speech. But there is never a good time for bad news.

“Well?” inquired the King, after a time. “You have something to suggest, I take it.”

The old soldier cleared his throat. “Sire,” he began, “it is said that a chancellor should have but one passion—his King. I have two: my King and my country.”

The King nodded gravely. He knew both passions, relied on both. And found them both a bit troublesome at times!

“Once, some years ago, sire, I came to you with a plan. The Princess Hedwig was a child then, and his late Royal Highness was—still with us. For that, and for other reasons, Your Majesty refused to listen. But things have changed. Between us and revolution there stand only the frail life of a boy and an army none too large, and already, perhaps, affected. There is much discontent, and the offspring of discontent is anarchy.”

The King snarled. But Mettlich had taken his courage in his hands, and went on. Their neighbor and hereditary foe was Karnia. Could they any longer afford the enmity of Karnia? One cause of discontent was the expense of the army, and of the fortifications along the Karnian border. If Karnia were allied with them, there would be no need of so great an army. They had the mineral wealth, and Karnia the seaports. The old dream of the Empire, of a railway to the sea, would be realized.

He pleaded well. The idea was not new. To place the little King Otto IX on the throne and keep him there in the face of opposition would require support from outside. Karnia would furnish this support. For a price.

The price was the Princess Hedwig.

Outside, Nikky Larisch rose, stretched, and fell to pacing the floor. It was one o’clock, and the palace slept. He lighted a cigarette, and stepping out into a small balcony which overlooked the Square, faced the quiet night.

“That is my plea, sire,” Mettlich finished. “Karl of Karnia is anxious to marry, and looks this way. To allay discontent and growing insurrection, to insure the boy’s safety and his throne, to beat our swords into ploughshares”—here he caught the King’s scowl; and added—“to a certain extent, and to make us a commercial as well as a military nation, surely, sire, it gains much for us, and loses us nothing.”

“But our independence!” said the King sourly.

However, he did not dismiss the idea. The fright of the afternoon had weakened him, and if Mettlich were right—he had what the King considered a perfectly damnable habit of being right—the Royalist party would need outside help to maintain the throne.

“Karnia!” he said. “The lion and the lamb, with the lamb inside the lion! And in, the mean time the boy—”

“He should be watched always.”

“The old she-dragon, the governess—I suppose she is trustworthy?”

“Perfectly. But she is a woman.”

“He has Lussin.” Count Lussin was the Crown Prince’s aide-de-camp.

“He needs a man, sire,” observed the Chancellor rather tartly.

The King cleared his throat. “This youngster he is so fond of, young Larisch, would he please you better?” he asked, with ironic deference.

“A good boy, sire. You may recall that his mother—” He stopped.

Perhaps the old King’s memory was good. Perhaps there was a change in Mettlich’s voice.

“A good boy?”

“None better, sire. He is devoted to His Royal Highness. He is still much of a lad himself. I have listened to them talking. It is a question which is the older! He is outside now.”

“Bring him in. I’ll have a look at him.”

Nikky, summoned by a chamberlain, stopped inside the doorway and bowed deeply.

“Come here,” said the King.

He advanced.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-three, sire.”

“In the Grenadiers, I believe.”

Nikky bowed.

“Like horses?” said the King suddenly.

“Very much, sire.”

“And boys?”

“I—some boys, sire.”

“Humph! Quite right, too. Little devils, most of them.” He drew himself tap in his chair. “Lieutenant Larisch,” he said, “His Royal Highness the Crown Prince has taken a liking to you. I believe it is to you that our fright to-day is due.”

Nikky’s heart thumped. He went rather pale.

“It is my intention, Lieutenant Larisch, to place the Crown Prince in your personal charge. For reasons I need not go into, it is imperative that he take no more excursions alone. These are strange times, when sedition struts in Court garments, and kings may trust neither their armies nor their subjects. I want,” he said, his tone losing its bitterness, “a real friend for the little Crown Prince. One who is both brave and loyal.”

Afterward, in his small room, Nikky composed a neat, well-rounded speech, in which he expressed his loyalty, gratitude, and undying devotion to the Crown Prince. It was an elegant little speech. Unluckily, the occasion for it had gone by two hours.

“I—I am grateful, sire,” was what he said. “I—” And there he stopped and choked up. It was rather dreadful.

“I depend on you, Captain Larisch,” said the King gravely, and nodded his head in a gesture of dismissal. Nikky backed toward the door, struck a hassock, all but went down, bowed again at the door, and fled.

“A fine lad,” said General Mettlich, “but no talker.”

“All the better,” replied His Majesty. “I am tired of men who talk well. And”—he smiled faintly—“I am tired of you. You talk too well. You make me think. I don’t want to think. I’ve been thinking all my life. It is time to rest, my friend.”

His Royal Highness the Crown Prince Ferdinand William Otto was in disgrace.

He had risen at six, bathed, dressed, and gone to Mass, in disgrace. He had breakfasted at seven-thirty on fruit, cereal, and one egg, in disgrace. He had gone to his study at eight o’clock for lessons, in disgrace. A long line of tutors came and went all morning, and he worked diligently, but he was still in disgrace. All morning long and in the intervals between tutors he had tried to catch Miss Braithwaite’s eye.

Except for the most ordinary civilities, she had refused to look in his direction. She was correcting an essay in English on Mr. Gladstone, with a blue pencil, and putting in blue commas every here and there. The Crown Prince was amazingly weak in commas. When she was all through, she piled the sheets together and wrote a word on the first page. It might have been “good.” On the other hand, it could easily have been “poor.” The motions of the hand are similar.

At last; in desperation, the Crown Prince deliberately broke off the point of his pencil, and went to the desk where Miss Braithwaite sat, monarch of the American pencil-sharpener which was the beloved of his heart.

“Again!” said Miss Braithwaite shortly. And raised her eyebrows.

“It’s a very soft pencil,” explained the Crown Prince. “When I press down on it, it—it busts.”

“It what?”

“It busts—breaks.” Evidently the English people were not familiar with this new and fascinating American word.

He cast a casual glance toward Mr. Gladstone. The word was certainly “poor.” Suddenly a sense of injustice began to rise in him. He had worked rather hard over Mr. Gladstone. He had done so because he knew that Miss Braithwaite considered him the greatest man since Jesus Christ, and even the Christ had not written “The Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion.”

The injustice went to his eyes and made him blink. He had apologized for yesterday, and explained fully. It was not fair. As to commas, anybody could put in enough commas.

The French tutor was standing near a photograph of Hedwig, and pretending not to look at it. Prince Ferdinand William Otto had a suspicion that the tutor was in love with Hedwig. On one occasion, when she had entered unexpectedly, he had certainly given out the sentence, “Ce dragon etait le vieux serpent, la princesse,” instead of “Ce dragon etait le vieux serpent, le roi.”

Prince Ferdinand William Otto did not like the French tutor. His being silly about Hedwig was not the reason. Even Nikky had that trouble, and once, when they were all riding together, had said, “Canter on the snaffle, trot on the curb,” when he meant exactly the opposite. It was not that. Part of it was because of his legs, which were inclined to knock at the knees. Mostly it was his eyes, which protruded. “When he reads my French exercises,” he complained once to Hedwig, “he waves them around like an ant’s.”

He and Hedwig usually spoke English together. Like most royalties, they had been raised on languages. It was as much as one’s brains were worth, sometimes, to try to follow them as they leaped from grammar to grammar.

“Like an aunt’s?” inquired Hedwig, mystified.

“An ant’s. They have eyes on the ends of their feelers, you know.”

But Miss Braithwaite, overhearing, had said that ants have no eyes at all. She had no imagination.

His taste of liberty had spoiled the Crown Prince for work. Instead of conjugating a French verb, he made a sketch of the Scenic Railway. He drew the little car, and two heads looking over the edge, with a sort of porcupine effect of hairs standing straight up.

“Otto!” said Miss Braithwaite sternly.

Miss Braithwaite did not say “sir” to him or “Your Royal Highness,” like the tutors. She had taken him from the arms of his mother when he was a baby, and had taught a succession of nurses how to fix his bottles, and made them raise the windows when he slept—which was heresy in that country, and was brought up for discussion in the Parliament. When it came time for his first tooth, and he was wickedly fretful, and the doctors had a consultation over him, it was Miss Braithwaite who had ignored everything they said, and rubbed the tooth through with her silver thimble. Boiled first, of course.

And when one has cut a Royal Highness’s first tooth, and broken him of sucking his thumb, and held a cold buttered knife against his bruises to prevent their discoloring, one does get out of the way of being very formal with him.

“Otto!” said Miss Braithwaite sternly.

So he went to work in earnest. He worked at a big desk, which had been his father’s. As a matter of fact, everything in the room was too big for him. It had not occurred to any one to make any concessions to his size. He went through life, one may say, with his legs dangling, or standing on tiptoe to see things.

The suite had been his father’s before him. Even the heavy old rug had been worn shabby by the scuffing of his father’s feet. On the wall there hung a picture his father had drawn. It was of a yacht in full sail. Prince Hubert had been fifteen when he drew it, and was contemplating abandoning his princely career and running away to be a pirate. As a matter of fact, the yacht boasted the black flag, as Otto knew quite well. Nikky had discover it. But none of the grown-ups had recognized the damning fact. Nikky was not, strictly speaking a grown-up.

The sun came through the deep embrasures of the window and set Prince Ferdinand William Otto’s feet to wriggling. It penetrated the gloomy fastnesses of the old room and showed its dingy furniture, its great desk, its dark velvet portieres, and the old cabinet in which the Crown Prince kept his toys on the top shelf. He had arranged them there himself, the ones he was fondest of in the front row, so he could look up and see them; a drum which he still dearly loved, but which made Miss Braithwaite’s headache; a locomotive with a broken spring; a steam-engine which Hedwig had given him, but which the King considered dangerous, and which had never, therefore, had its baptism of fire; and a dilapidated and lop-eared cloth dog.

He was exceedingly fond of the dog. For quite a long time he had taken it to bed with him at night, and put its head on his pillow. It was the most comforting thing, when the lights were all out. Until he was seven he had been allowed a bit of glimmer, a tiny wick floating in a silver dish of lard-oil, for a night-light. But after his eighth birthday that had been done away with, Miss Braithwaite considering it babyish.

The sun shone in on the substantial but cheerless room; on the picture of the Duchess Hedwig, untouched by tragedy or grief; on the heavy, paneled old doors through which, once on a time, Prince Hubert had made his joyous exits into a world that had so early cast him out; on his swords, crossed over the fireplace; his light rapier, his heavy cavalry saber; on the bright head of his little son, around whom already so many plots and counterplots were centering.

The Crown Prince Ferdinand William Otto found the sun unsettling. Besides, he hated verbs. Nouns were different. One could do something with nouns, although even they had a way of having genders. Into his head popped a recollection of a delightful pastime of the day before—nothing more nor less than flipping paper wads at the guard on the Scenic Railway as the car went past him.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto tore off the corner of a piece of paper, chewed it deliberately, rounded and hardened it with his royal fingers, and aimed it at M. Puaux. It struck him in the eye.

Instantly things happened. M. Puaux yelled, and clapped a hand to his eye. Miss Braithwaite rose. His Royal Highness wrote a rather shaky French verb, with the wrong termination. And on to this scene came Nikky for the riding-lesson. Nikky, smiling and tidy, and very shiny as to riding-boots and things, and wearing white kid gloves. Every one about a palace wears white kid gloves, except the royalties themselves. It is extremely expensive.

Nikky surveyed the scene. He had, of course, bowed inside the door, and all that sort of thing. But Nikky was an informal person, and was quite apt to bow deeply before his future sovereign, and then poke him in the chest.

“Well!” said Nikky.

“Good-morning,” said Prince Ferdinand William Otto, in a small and nervous voice.

“Nothing wrong, is there?” demanded Nikky.

M. Puaux got out his handkerchief and said nothing violently.

“Otto!” said Miss Braithwaite. “What did you do?”

“Nothing.” He looked about. He was quite convinced that M. Puaux was what Bobby would have termed a poor sport, and had not played the game fairly. The guard at the railway, he felt, would not have yelled and wept. “Oh, well, I threw a piece of paper. That’s all. I didn’t think it would hurt.”

Miss Braithwaite rose and glanced at the carpet. But Nikky was quick. Quick and understanding. He put his shiny foot over the paper wad.

“Paper!” said Miss Braithwaite. “Why did you throw paper? And at M. Puaux?”

“I—just felt like throwing something,” explained His Royal Highness. “I guess it’s the sun, or something.”

Nikky dropped his glove, and miraculously, when he had picked it up the little wad was gone.

“For throwing paper, five marks,” said Miss Braithwaite, and put it down in the book she carried in her pocket. It was rather an awful book. On Saturdays the King looked it over, and demanded explanations. “For untidy nails, five marks! A gentleman never has untidy nails, Otto. For objecting to winter flannels, two marks. Humph! For pocketing sugar from the tea-tray, ten marks! Humph! For lack of attention during religious instruction, five marks. Ten off for the sugar, and only five for inattention to religious instruction! What have you to say, sir?”

Prince Ferdinand William Otto looked at Nikky and Nikky looked back. Then Ferdinand William Otto’s left eyelid drooped. Nikky was astounded. How was he to know the treasury of strange things that the Crown Prince had tapped the previous afternoon? But, after a glance around the room, Nikky’s eyelid drooped also. He slid the paper wad into his pocket.

“I am afraid His Royal Highness has hurt your eye, M. Puaux,” said Miss Braithwaite. Not with sympathy. She hated tutors.

“Not at all,” said the unhappy young man, testing the eye to discover if he could see through it. “I am sure His Royal Highness meant no harm.” M. Puaux went out, with his handkerchief to his eye. He turned at the door and bowed, but as no one was paying any attention to him, he made two bows. One was to Hedwig’s picture.

While Oskar, his valet, put the Crown Prince into riding-clothes, Nikky and Miss Braithwaite had a talk. Nikky was the only person to whom Miss Braithwaite really unbent. Once he had written to a friend of his in China, and secured for her a large box of the best China tea. Miss Braithwaite only brewed it when the Archduchess made one of her rare visits to the Crown Prince’s apartment.

But just now their talk was very serious. It began by Nikky’s stating that she was likely to see him a great deal now, and he hoped she would not find him in the way. He had been made aide-de-camp to the Crown Prince, vice Count Lussin, who had resigned on account of illness, having been roused at daybreak out of a healthy sleep to do it.

Not that Nikky said just that. What he really observed was: “The King sent for me last night, Miss Braithwaite, and—and asked me to hang around.”

Thus Nikky, of his sacred trust! None the less sacred to him, either, that he spoke lightly. He glanced up at the crossed swords, and his eyes were hard.

And Miss Braithwaite knew. She reached over and put a hand on his arm. “You and I,” she said. “Out of all the people in this palace, only you and I! The Archduchess hates him. I see it in her eyes. She can never forgive him for keeping the throne from Hedwig. The Court? Do they ever think of the boy, except to dread his minority, with Mettlich in control? A long period of mourning, a regency, no balls, no gayety that is all they think of. And whom can we trust? The very guards down below, the sentries at our doors, how do we know they are loyal?”

“The people love him,” said Nikky doggedly.

“The people! Sheep. I do not trust the people. I do not trust any one. I watch, but what can I do? The very food we eat—”

“He is coming,” said Nikky softly. And fell to whistling under his breath.

Together Nikky and Prince Ferdinand William Otto went out and down the great marble staircase. Sentries saluted. Two flunkies in scarlet and gold threw open the doors. A stray dog that had wandered into the courtyard watched them gravely.

“I wish,” said Prince Ferdinand William Otto, “that I might have a dog.”

“A dog! Why?”

“Well, it would be company. Dogs are very friendly. Yesterday I met a boy who has a dog. It sleeps on his bed at night.”

“You have a good many things, you know,” Nikky argued. “You’ve got a dozen horses, for one thing.”

“But a dog’s different.” He felt the difference, but he could not put it into words. “And I’d rather have only one horse. I’d get better acquainted with it.”

Nikky looked back. Although it had been the boast of the royal family for a century that it could go about unattended, that its only danger was from the overzeal of the people in showing their loyalty, not since the death of Prince Hubert had this been true in fact. No guards or soldiers accompanied them, but the secret police were always near at hand. So Nikky looked, made sure that a man in civilian clothing was close at their heels, and led the way across the Square to the riding-school.

A small crowd lined up and watched the passing of the little Prince. As he passed, men lifted their hats and women bowed. He smiled right and left, and, took two short steps to one of Nikky’s long ones.

“I have a great many friends,” he said with a sigh of content, as they neared the riding-school. “I suppose I don’t really need a dog.”

“Look here,” said Nikky, after a pause. He was not very quick in thinking things out. He placed, as a fact, more reliance on his right arm than on his brain. But once he had thought a thing out, it stuck. “Look here, Highness, you didn’t treat your friends very well yesterday.”

“I know;” said Prince Ferdinand William Otto meekly. But Prince Ferdinand William Otto had thought out a defense. “I got back all right, didn’t I?” He considered. “It was worth it. A policeman shook me!”

“Which policeman?” demanded Nikky in a terrible tone, and in his fury quite forgot the ragging he had prepared for Otto.

“I think I’ll not tell you, if you don’t mind. And I bought a fig lady. I’ve saved the legs for you.”

Fortune smiled on Nikky that day. Had, indeed, been smiling daily for some three weeks. Singularly enough, the Princess Hedwig, who had been placed on a pony at the early age of two, and who had been wont to boast that she could ride any horse in her grandfather’s stables, was taking riding-lessons. From twelve to one—which was, also singularly, the time Prince Ferdinand William Otto and Nikky rode in the ring—the Princess Hedwig rode also. Rode divinely. Rode saucily. Rode, when Nikky was ahead, tenderly.

To tell the truth, Prince Ferdinand William Otto rather hoped, this morning, that Hedwig would not be there. There was a difference in Nikky when Hedwig was around. When she was not there he would do all sorts of things, like jumping on his horse while it was going, and riding backward in the saddle, and so on. He had once even tried jumping on his horse as it galloped past him, and missed, and had been awfully ashamed about it. But when Hedwig was there, there was no skylarking. They rode around, and the riding-master put up jumps and they took them. And finally Hedwig would get tired, and ask Nikky please to be amusing while she rested. And he would not be amusing at all. The Crown Prince felt that she never really saw Nikky at his best.

Hedwig was there. She had on a new habit, and a gardenia in her buttonhole, and she gave Nikky her hand to kiss, but only nodded to the Crown Prince.

“Hello, Otto!” she said. “I thought you’d have a ball and chain on your leg to-day.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my legs,” said Prince Ferdinand William Otto, staring at the nets habit. “But yours look rather queer.”

Hedwig flushed. The truth was that she was wearing, for the first time, a cross-saddle habit of coat and trousers. And coat and trousers were forbidden to the royal women. She eyed Otto with defiance, and turned an appealing glance to Nikky. But her voice was very dignified.

“I bought them myself,” she said. “I consider it a perfectly modest costume, and much safer than the other.”

“It is quite lovely—on you, Highness,” said Nikky.

In a stiff chair at the edge of the ring Hedwig’s lady in waiting sat resignedly. She was an elderly woman, and did not ride. Just now she was absorbed in wondering what would happen to her when the Archduchess discovered this new freak of Hedwig’s. Perhaps she would better ask permission to go into retreat for a time. The Archduchess, who had no religion herself, approved of it in others. She took a soft rubber from her pocket, and tried to erase a spot from her white kid gloves.

The discovery that Hedwig had two perfectly good legs rather astounded Prince Ferdinand William Otto. He felt something like consternation.

“I’ve never seen any one else dressed like that,” he observed, as the horses were brought up.

Hedwig colored again. She looked like an absurdly pretty boy. “Don’t be a silly,” she replied, rather sharply. “Every one does it, except here, where old fossils refuse to think that anything new can be proper. If you’re going to be that sort of a king when you grow up, I’ll go somewhere else to live.”

Nikky looked gloomy. The prospect, although remote, was dreary. But, as the horses were led out, and he helped Hedwig to her saddle, he brightened. After all, the future was the future, and now was now.

“Catch me!” said Hedwig, and dug her royal heels into her horse’s flanks. The Crown Prince climbed into his saddle and followed. They were off.

The riding-school had been built for officers of the army, but was now used by the Court only. Here the King had ridden as a lad with young Mettlich, his close friend even then. The favorite mare of his later years, now old and almost blind, still had a stall in the adjacent royal stables. One of the King’s last excursions abroad had been to visit her.

Overhead, up a great runway, were the state chariots, gilt coaches of inconceivable weight, traveling carriages of the post-chaise periods, sleighs in which four horses drove abreast, their panels painted by the great artists of the time; and one plain little vehicle, very shabby, in which the royal children of long ago had fled from a Karnian invasion.

In one corner, black and gold and forbidding, was the imposing hearse in which the dead sovereigns of the country were taken to their long sleep in the vaults under the cathedral. Good, bad, and indifferent, one after the other, as their hour came, they had taken this last journey in the old catafalque, and had joined their forbears. Many they had been: men of iron, men of blood, men of flesh, men of water. And now they lay in stone crypts, and of all the line only two remained.

One and all, the royal vehicles were shrouded in sheets, except on one day of each month when the sheets were removed and the public admitted. But on that morning the great hearse was uncovered, and two men were working, one at the upholstery, which he was brushing. The other was carefully oiling the wood of the body. Save for them, the wide and dusky loft was empty.

One was a boy, newly come from the country. The other was an elderly man. It was he who oiled.

“Many a king has this carried,” said the man. “My father, who was here before me, oiled it for the last one.”

“May it be long before it carries another!” commented the boy fervently.

“It will not be long. The old King fails hourly. And this happening of yesterday—”

“What happened yesterday?” queried the boy.

“It was a matter of the Crown Prince.”

“Was he ill?”

“He ran away,” said the man shortly.

“Ran away?” The boy stopped his dusting, and stared, open-mouthed.

“Aye, ran away. Grew weary of back-bending, perhaps. I do not know. I do not believe in kings.”

“Not believe in kings?” The boy stopped his brushing.

“You do, of course,” sneered the man. “Because a thing is, it is right. But I think. I use my brains. I reason. And I do not believe in kings.”

Up the runway came sounds from the ring, the thudding of hoofs, followed by a child’s shrill, joyous laughter. The man scowled.

“Listen!” he said. “We labor and they play.”

“It has always been so. I do not begrudge happiness.”

But the man was not listening.

“I do not believe in kings,” he said sullenly.

The Archduchess was having tea. Her boudoir was a crowded little room. Nikky had once observed confidentially to Miss Braithwaite that it was exactly like her, all hung and furnished with things that were not needed. The Archduchess liked it because it was warm. The palace rooms were mostly large and chilly. She lad a fire there on the warmest days in spring, and liked to put the coals on, herself. She wrapped them in pieces of paper so she would not soil her hands.

This afternoon she was not alone. Lounging at a window was the lady who was in waiting at the time, the Countess Loschek. Just now she was getting rather a wigging, but she was remarkably calm.

“The last three times,” the Archduchess said, stirring her tea, “you have had a sore throat.”

“It is such a dull book,” explained the Countess.

“Not at all. It is an improving book. If you would put your mind on it when you are reading, Olga, you would enjoy it. And you would learn something, besides. In my opinion,” went on the Archduchess, tasting her tea, “you smoke too many cigarettes.”

The Countess yawned, but silently, at her window.

Then she consulted a thermometer. “Eighty!” she said briefly, and, coming over, sat down by the tea-table.

The Countess Loschek was thirty, and very handsome, in an insolent way. She was supposed to be the best-dressed woman at the Court, and to rule Annunciata with an iron hand, although it was known that they quarreled a great deal over small things, especially over the coal fire.

Some said that the real thing that held them together was resentment that the little Crown Prince stood between the Princess Hedwig and the throne. Annunciata was not young, but she was younger than her dead brother, Hubert. And others said it was because the Countess gathered up and brought in the news of the Court—the small intrigues and the scandals that constitute life in the restricted walls of a palace. There is a great deal of gossip in a palace where the king is old and everything rather stupid and dull.

The Countess yawned again.

“Where is Hedwig?” demanded the Archduchess.

“Her Royal Highness is in the nursery, probably.”

“Why probably?”

“She goes there a great deal.”

The Archduchess eyed her. “Well, out with it,” she said. “There is something seething in that wicked brain of yours.”

The Countess shrugged her shoulders. Not that she resented having a wicked brain. She rather fancied the idea. “She and young Lieutenant Larisch have tea quite frequently with His Royal Highness.”

“How frequently?”

“Three times this last week, madame.”

“Little fool!” said Annunciata. But she frowned, and sat tapping her teacup with her spoon. She was just a trifle afraid of Hedwig, and she was more anxious than she would have cared to acknowledge. “It is being talked about, of course?”

The Countess shrugged her shoulders.

“Don’t do that!” commanded the Archduchess sharply. “How far do you think the thing has gone?”

“He is quite mad about her.”

“And Hedwig—but she is silly enough for anything. Do they meet anywhere else?”

“At the riding-school, I believe. At least, I—”

Here a maid entered and stood waiting at the end of the screen. The Archduchess Annunciata would have none of the palace flunkies about her when she could help it. She had had enough of men, she maintained, in the person of her late husband, whom she had detested. So except at dinner she was attended by tidy little maids, in gray Quaker costumes, who could carry tea-trays into her crowded boudoir without breaking things.

“His Excellency, General Mettlich,” said the maid.

The Archduchess nodded her august head, and the maid retired. “Go away, Olga,” said the Archduchess. “And you might,” she suggested grimly, “gargle your throat.”

The Chancellor had passed a troubled night. Being old, like the King, he required little sleep. And for most of the time between one o’clock and his rising hour of five he had lain in his narrow camp-bed and thought. He had not confided all his worries to the King.

Evidences of renewed activity on the part of the Terrorists were many. In the past month two of his best secret agents had disappeared. One had been found the day before, stabbed in the back. The Chancellor had seen the body—an unpleasant sight. But it was not of the dead man that General Mettlich thought. It was of the other. The dead tell nothing. But the living, under torture, tell many things. And this man Haeckel, young as he was, knew much that was vital. Knew the working of the Secret Service, the names of the outer circle of twelve, knew the codes and passwords, knew, too the ways of the palace, the hidden room always ready for emergency, even the passage that led by devious ways, underground, to a distant part of the great park.

At five General Mettlich had risen, exercised before an open window with an old pair of iron dumbbells, had followed this with a cold bath and hot coffee, and had gone to early Mass at the Cathedral.

And there, on his knees, he had prayed for a little help. He was, he said, getting old and infirm, and he had been too apt all his life to rely on his own right arm. But things were getting rather difficult. He prayed to Our Lady for intercession for the little Prince. He felt, in his old heart, that the Mother would understand the situation, and how he felt about it. And he asked in a general supplication, and very humbly, for a few years more of life. Not that life meant anything to him personally. He had outlived most of those he loved. But that he might serve the King, and after him the boy who would be Otto IX. He added, for fear they might not understand, having a great deal to look after, that he had earned all this by many years of loyalty, and besides, that he knew the situation better than any one else.

He felt much better after that. Especially as, at the moment he rose from his knees, the cathedral clock had chimed and then struck seven. He had found seven a very lucky number, So now he entered the boudoir of the Archduchess Annunciata, and the Countess went out another door, and closed it behind her, immediately opening it about an inch.

The Chancellor strode around the screen, scratching two tables with his sword as he advanced, and kissed the hand of the Princess Annunciata. They were old enemies and therefore always very polite to each other. The Archduchess offered him a cup of tea, which he took, although she always made very bad tea. And for a few moments they discussed things. Thus: the King’s condition; the replanting of the Place with trees; and the date of bringing out the Princess Hilda, who was still in the schoolroom.

But the Archduchess suddenly came to business. She was an abrupt person. “And now, General,” she said, “what is it?”

“I am in trouble, Highness,” replied the Chancellor simply.

“We are most of us in that condition at all times. I suppose you mean this absurd affair of yesterday. Why such a turmoil about it? The boy ran away. When he was ready he returned. It was absurd, and I dare say you and I both are being held for our sins. But he is here now, and safe.”

“I am afraid he is not as safe as you think, madame.”

“Why?”

He sat forward on the edge of his chair, and told her of the students at the University, who were being fired by some powerful voice; of the disappearance of the two spies; of the evidence that the Committee of Ten was meeting again, and the failure to discover their meeting-place; of disaffection among the people, according to the reports of his agents. And then to the real purpose of his visit. Karl of Karnia had, unofficially, proposed for the Princess Hedwig. He had himself broached the matter to the King, who had at least taken it under advisement. The Archduchess listened, rather pale. There was no mistaking the urgency in the Chancellor’s voice.

“Madame after centuries of independence we now face a crisis which we cannot meet alone. Believe me, I know of what I speak. United, we could stand against the world. But a divided kingdom, a disloyal and discontented people, spells the end.”

And at last he convinced her. But, because she was built of a contrary mould, she voiced an objection, not to the scheme, but to Karl himself. “I dislike him. He is arrogant and stupid.”

“But powerful, madame. And—what else is there to do?”

There was nothing else, and she knew it. But she refused to broach the matter to Hedwig.

She stated, and perhaps not without reason, that such a move was to damn the whole thing at once. She did not use exactly these words, but their royal equivalent. And it ended with the Chancellor, looking most ferocious but inwardly uneasy, undertaking to put, as one may say, a flea into the Princess Hedwig’s small ear.

As he strode out, the door into the next room closed quietly.

Tea at the Palace, until the old King had taken to his bed, had been the one cheerful hour of the day. The entire suite gathered in one of the salons, and remained standing until the King’s entrance. After that, formality ceased. Groups formed, footmen in plush with white wigs passed trays of cakes and sandwiches and tiny gilt cups of exquisite tea. The Court, so to speak, removed its white gloves, and was noisy and informal. True, at dinner again ceremony and etiquette would reign. The march into the dining-hall between rows of bowing servants, the set conversation, led by the King, the long and tedious courses, the careful watch for precedence that was dinner at the Palace.

But now all that was changed. The King did not leave his apartment. Annunciata occasionally took tea with the suite, but glad for an excuse, left the Court to dine without her. Sometimes for a half-hour she lent her royal if somewhat indifferently attired presence to the salon afterward, where for thirty minutes or so she moved from group to group, exchanging a few more or less gracious words. But such times were rare. The Archduchess, according to Court gossip, had “slumped.”

To Hedwig the change had been a relief. The entourage, with its gossip, its small talk, its liaisons, excited in her only indifference and occasional loathing. Not that her short life had been without its affairs. She was too lovely for that. But they had touched her only faintly.

On the day of the Chancellor’s visit to her mother she went to tea in the schoolroom. She came in glowing from a walk, with the jacket of her dark velvet suit thrown open, and a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley tucked in her belt.

Tea had already come, and Captain Larisch, holding his cup, was standing by the table. The Crown Prince, who was allowed only one cup, was having a second of hot water and milk, equal parts, and sweetened.

Hedwig slipped out of her jacket and drew off her gloves. She had hardly glanced at Nikky, although she knew quite well every motion he had made since she entered. “I am famished!” she said, and proceeded to eat very little and barely touch the tea. “Please don’t go, Miss Braithwaite. And now, how is everything?”

Followed a long half-hour, in which the Crown Prince talked mostly of the Land of Desire and the American boy. Miss Braithwaite, much indulged by long years of service, crocheted, and Nikky Larisch, from the embrasure of a window, watched the little group. In reality he watched Hedwig, all his humble, boyish heart in his eyes.

After a time Hedwig slipped the lilies out of her belt and placed them in a glass of water.

“They are thirsty, poor things,” she said to Otto. Only—and here was a strange thing, if she were really sorry for them—one of the stalks fell to the floor, and she did not trouble to pick it up. Nikky retrieved it, and pretended to place it with the others. But in reality he had palmed it quite neatly, and a little later he pocketed it. Still later, he placed it in his prayer-book.

The tea-table became rather noisy. The room echoed with laughter. Even Miss Braithwaite was compelled to wipe her eyes over some of Nikky’s sallies, and the Crown Prince was left quite gasping. Nikky was really in his best form, being most unreasonably happy, and Hedwig, looking much taller than in her boyish riding-clothes—Hedwig was fairly palpitating with excitement.

Nikky was a born mimic. First he took off the King’s Council, one by one. Then in an instant he was Napoleon, which was easy, of course; and the next second, with one of the fur tails which had come unfastened from Hedwig’s muff, he had become a pirate, with the tail for a great mustache. One of the very best things he did, however, was to make a widow’s cap out of a tea-napkin, and surmount it with a tiny coronet, which was really Hedwig’s bracelet. He put it on, drew down his upper lip, and puffed his cheeks, and there was Queen Victoria of England to the life.

Hedwig was so delighted with this, that she made him sit down, and draped one of Miss Braithwaite’s shawls about his shoulders. It was difficult to look like Queen Victoria under the circumstances, with her small hands deftly draping and smoothing. But Nikky did very well.

It was just as Hedwig was tucking the shawl about his neck to hide the collar of his tunic, and Miss Braithwaite was looking a trifle offended, because she considered the memory of Queen Victoria not to be trifled with, and just as Nikky took a fresh breath and puffed out leis cheeks again, that the Archduchess came in.

She entered unannounced, save by a jingle of chains, and surveyed the room with a single furious glance. Queen Victoria’s cheeks collapsed and the coronet slid slightly to one side. Then Nikky rose and jerked off the shawl and bowed. Every one looked rather frightened, except the Crown Prince. In a sort of horrible silence he advanced and kissed Annunciata’s hand.

“So—this is what you are doing,” observed Her Royal Highness to Hedwig. “In this—this undignified manner you spend your time!”

“It is very innocent fun, mother.”

For that matter, there was nothing very dignified in the scene that followed. The Archduchess dismissed the governess and the Crown Prince, quite as if he had been an ordinary child, and naughty at that. Miss Braithwaite looked truculent. After all, the heir to the throne is the heir to the throne and should have the privilege of his own study. But Hedwig gave her an appealing glance, and she went out, closing the door with what came dangerously near being a slam.

The Archduchess surveyed the two remaining culprits with a terrible gaze. “Now,” she said, “how long have these ridiculous performances been going on?”

“Mother!” said Hedwig.

“Answer me.”

“The question is absurd. There was no harm in what we were doing. It amused Otto. He has few enough pleasures. Thanks to all of us, he is very lonely.”

“And since when have you assumed the responsibility for his upbringing?”

“I remember my own dreary childhood,” said Hedwig stiffly.

The Archduchess turned on her furiously. “More and more,” she said, “as you grow up, Hedwig, you remind me of your unfortunate father. You have the same lack of dignity, the same”—she glanced at Nikky—“the same common tastes, the same habit of choosing strange society, of forgetting your rank.”

Hedwig was scarlet, but Nikky had gone pale. As for the Archduchesss, her cameos were rising and falling stormily. With hands that shook; Hedwig picked up her jacket and hat. Then she moved toward the door.

“Perhaps you are right, mother,” she said, “but I hope I shall never have the bad taste to speak ill of the dead.” Then she went out.

The scene between the Archduchess and Nikky began in a storm and ended in a sort of hopeless quiet. Miss Braithwaite had withdrawn to her sitting-room, but even there she could hear the voice of Annunciata, rasping and angry.

It was very clear to Nikky from the beginning that the Archduchess’s wrath was not for that afternoon alone. And in his guilty young mind rose various memories, all infinitely dear, all infinitely, incredibly reckless—other frolics around the tea-table, rides in the park, lessons in the riding-school. Very soon he was confessing them all, in reply to sharp questions. When the tablet of his sins was finally uncovered, the Archduchess was less angry and a great deal more anxious. Hedwig free was a problem. Hedwig in love with this dashing boy was a greater one.

“Of one thing I must assure Your Highness,” said Nikky. “These—these meetings have been of my seeking.”

“The Princess requires no defense, Captain Larisch.”

That put him back where he belonged, and Annunciata did a little thinking, while Nikky went on, in his troubled way, running his fingers through his hair until he looked rather like an uneasy but ardent-eyed porcupine. He acknowledged that these meetings had meant much to him, everything to him, he would confess, but he had never dared to hope. He had always thought of Her Royal Highness as the granddaughter of his King. He had never spoken a word that he need regret. Annunciata listened, and took his measure shrewdly. He was the sort of young fool, she told herself, who would sacrifice himself and crucify his happiness for his country. It was on just such shoulders as his that the throne was upheld. His loyalty was more to be counted on than his heart.

She changed her tactics adroitly, sat down, even softened her voice. “I have been emphatic, Captain Larisch,” she said, “because, as I think you know, things are not going too well with us. To help the situation, certain plans are being made. I will be more explicit. A marriage is planned for the Princess Hedwig, which will assist us all. It is”—she hesitated imperceptibly—“the King’s dearest wish.”

Horror froze on Nikky’s face. But he bowed.

“After what you have told me, I shall ask your cooperation,” said Annunciata smoothly. “While there are some of us who deplore the necessity, still—it exists. And an alliance with Karnia—”

“Karnia!” cried Nikky, violating all ceremonial, of course. “But surely—!”

The Archduchess rose and drew herself to her full height. “I have given you confidence for confidence, Captain Larisch,” she said coldly. “The Princess Hedwig has not yet been, told. We shall be glad of your assistance when that time comes. It is possible, that it will not come. In case it does, we shall count on you.”

Nikky bowed deeply as she went out; bowed, with death in his eyes.

And thus it happened that Captain Nicholas Larisch aide-de-camp to his Royal Highness the Crown Prince Ferdinand William Otto, and of no other particular importance, was informed of the Princess Hedwig’s projected marriage before she was. And not only informed of it, but committed to forward it, if he could!

The Countess Loschek was alone. Alone and storming. She had sent her maid away with a sharp word, and now she was pacing the floor.

Hedwig, of all people!

She hated her. She had always hated her. For her youth, first; later, when she saw how things were going, for the accident that had made her a granddaughter to the King.

And Karl.

Even this last June, when Karl had made his looked-for visit to the summer palace where the Court had been in, residence, he had already had the thing in mind. Even when his arms had been about her, Olga Loschek, he had been looking over her shoulder, as it were, at Hedwig. He had had it all in his wicked head, even then. For Karl was wicked. None would know it better than she, who was risking everything, life itself, for him. Wicked; ungrateful, and unscrupulous. She loathed him while she loved him.

The thing would happen. This was the way things were done in Courts. An intimation from one side that a certain thing would be agreeable and profitable. A discussion behind closed doors. A reply that the intimation had been well received. Then the formal proposal, and its acceptance.

Hedwig would marry Karl. She might be troublesome, would indeed almost certainly be troublesome. Strangely enough, the Countess hated her the more for that. To value so lightly the thing for which Olga Loschek would have given her soul, this in itself was hateful. But there was more. The Countess saw much with her curiously wide, almost childishly bland eyes; it was only now that it occurred to her to turn what she knew of Hedwig and Nikky to account.

She stopped pacing the floor, and sat down. Suppose Hedwig and Nikky Larisch went away together? Hedwig, she felt, would have the courage even for that. That would stop things. But Hedwig did not trust her. And there was about Nikky a dog-like quality of devotion, which warned her that, the deeper his love for Hedwig, the more unlikely he would be to bring her to disgrace. Nikky might be difficult.

“The fool!” said the Countess, between her clenched teeth. To both the Archduchess Annunciata and her henchwoman, people were chiefly divided into three classes, fools, knaves, and themselves.

She must try for Hedwig’s confidence, then. But Karl! How to reach him? Not with reproaches, not with anger. She knew her man well. To hold him off was the first thing. To postpone the formal proposal, and gain time. If the Chancellor had been right, and things were as bad as they appeared, the King’s death would precipitate a crisis. Might, indeed, overturn the throne.

And Karl had changed. The old days when he loved trouble were gone. His thoughts, like all thoughts these days, she reflected contemptuously, were turned to peace, not to war. He was for beating his swords into ploughshares, with a vengeance.

To hold him off, then. To gain time.

The King was very feeble. This affair of yesterday had told on him. The gossip of the Court was that the day had seen a change for the worse. His heart was centered on the Crown Prince.

Ah, here was another viewpoint. Suppose the Crown Prince had not come back? What would happen, with the King dead, and no king? Chaos, of course. A free hand to revolution. Hedwig fighting for her throne, and inevitably losing it. Then what about Karl and his dreams of peace?

But that was further than she cared to go just then. She would finish certain work that she had set out to do, and then she was through. No longer would dread and terror grip her in the night hours.

But she would finish. Karl should never say she had failed him. In her new rage against him she was for cleaning the slate at once. She had in her possession papers for which he waited or pretended to wait; data secured by means she did not care to remember; plans and figures carefully compiled—a thousand deaths in one, if, they were found on her. She would get them out of her hands at once.

It was still but little after five. She brought her papers together on her small mahogany desk, from such hiding places as women know—the linings of perfumed sachets, the toes of small slippers, the secret pocket in a muff; and having locked her doors, put them in order. Her hands were trembling, but she worked skillfully. She was free until the dinner hour, but she had a great deal to do. The papers in order, she went to a panel in the wall of her dressing-room; and, sliding it aside, revealed the safe in which her jewels were kept. Not that her jewels were very valuable, but the safe was there, and she used it.

The palace, for that matter, was full of cunningly contrived hiding-places. Some, in times of stress, had held jewels. Others—rooms these, built in the stone walls and carefully mapped—had held even royal refugees themselves. The map was in the King’s possession, and descended from father to son, a curious old paper, with two of the hidden rooms marked off in colored inks as closed. Closed, with strange secrets beyond, quite certainly.

The Countess took out a jewel-case, emptied it, lifted its chamois cushions, and took out a small book. It was an indifferent hiding-place, but long immunity had made her careless. Referring to the book, she wrote a letter in code. It was, to all appearances a friendly letter referring to a family in her native town, and asking that the recipient see that assistance be sent them before Thursday of the following week. The assistance was specified with much detail—at her expense to send so many blankets, so many loaves of bread, a long list. Having finished, she destroyed, by burning, a number of papers watching until the last ash had turned from dull red to smoking gray. The code-book she hesitated over, but at last, with a shrug of her shoulders, she returned it to its hiding-place in the jewel case.

Coupled with her bitterness was a sense of relief. Only when the papers were destroyed had she realized the weight they had been. She summoned Minna, her maid, and dressed for the street. Then, Minna accompanying her, she summoned her carriage and went shopping.

She reached the palace again in time to dress for dinner. Somewhere on that excursion she had left the letter, to be sent to its destination over the border by special messenger that night.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto, at the moment of her return, was preparing for bed. At a quarter to seven he had risen, bowed to Miss Braithwaite, said good-night, and disappeared toward his bedroom and his waiting valet. But a moment later he reappeared.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but I think your watch is fast.”

Miss Braithwaite consulted it. Then, rising she went to the window and compared at with the moonlike face of the cathedral clock.

“There is a difference of five minutes,” she conceded. “But I have no confidence in the cathedral clock. It needs oiling, probably. Besides, there are always pigeons sitting on the hands.”

“May I wait for five minutes?”

“What could you do in five minutes?”

“Well,” he suggested, rather pleadingly, “we might have a little conversation, if you axe not too tired.”

Miss Braithwaite sighed. It had been a long day and not a calm one, and conversation with His Highness meant questions, mostly.

“Very well,” she said.

“I’m not at all sleepy,” Prince Ferdinand William Otto observed, climbing on a chair. “I thought you might tell me about America. I’m awfully curious about America.”

“I suppose you mean the United States.”

“I’m not sure. It has New York, in it, anyhow. They don’t have kings, do they?”

“No,” said Miss Braithwaite, shortly. She hated republics.

“What I wondered was,” said Ferdinand William Otto, swinging his legs, “how they managed without a king. Who tells them what to do? I’m interested, because I met a boy yesterday who came from there, and he talked quite a lot about it. He was a very interesting boy.”

Miss Braithwaite waived the matter of yesterday. “In a republic,” she said, “the people think they can govern themselves. But they do it very badly. The average intelligence among people in the mass is always rather low.”

“He said,” went on His Royal Highness, pursuing a line of thought, “that the greatest man in the world was a man named Lincoln. But that he is dead. And he said that kings were nuisances, and didn’t earn their bread-and-butter. Of course,” Otto hastened to explain, “he didn’t know that my grandfather is a king. After that, I didn’t exactly like to tell him. It would have made him very uncomfortable.” Here he yawned, but covered it with a polite hand, and Oskar, his valet, came to the doorway and stood waiting. He was a dignified person in a plum-colored livery, because the King considered black gloomy for a child.

The Crown Prince slipped to the floor, and stood with his feet rather wide apart, looking steadfastly at Miss Braithwaite. “I would like very much to see that boy again,” he observed. “He was a nice boy, and very kind-hearted. If we could go to the Scenic Railway when we are out in the carriage, I—I’d enjoy it.” He saw refusal in her face, for he added hurriedly, “Not to ride. I just want to look at it.”

Miss Braithwaite was touched, but firm. She explained that it would be better if the Crown Prince did not see the boy again; and to soften the refusal, she reminded him that the American child did not like royalties, and that even to wave from his carriage with the gold wheels would therefore be a tactical error.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto listened, and Oskar waited. And something that had been joyous and singing in a small boy’s heart was suddenly still.

“I had forgotten about that,” he said.

Then Miss Braithwaite rose, and the Prince put his heels together with a click, and bowed, as he had been taught to do.

“Good-night,” he said.

“Good-night, Your Highness,” replied Miss Braithwaite.

At the door Prince Ferdinand William Otto turned and bowed again. Then he went out, and the door closed behind him.

He washed himself, with Oskar standing by, holding a great soft towel. Even the towels were too large. And he brushed his teeth, and had two drinks of water, because a stiffish feeling in his throat persisted. And at last he crawled up into the high bed that was so much too big for him, and had to crawl out again, because he had forgotten his prayers.

When everything was done, and the hour of putting out the light could no longer be delayed, he said goodnight to Oskar, who bowed. There was a great deal of, bowing in Otto’s world. Then, whisk! it was dark, with only the moon face of the cathedral clock for company. And as it was now twenty minutes past seven, the two hands drooped until it looked like a face with a cruel mouth and was really very poor company.

Oskar, having bowed himself into the corridor and past the two sentries, reported to a very great dignitary across the hall that His Royal Highness the Crown Prince Ferdinand William Otto was in bed. And the dignitary had a chance to go away and get his dinner.

But alone in his great bed, the Crown Prince was shedding a few shamefaced tears. He was extremely ashamed of them. He felt that under no circumstances would his soldier father have behaved so. He reached out and secured one of the two clean folded handkerchiefs that were always placed on the bedside stand at night, and blew his nose very loudly. But he could not sleep.

He gave Miss Braithwaite time to go to her sitting-room, and for eight o’clock to pass, because once every hour, all night, a young gentleman of the Court, appointed for this purpose and dubbed a “wet-nurse” by jealous comrades, cautiously opened his door and made a stealthy circuit of the room, to see that all was well.

The Crown Prince got up. He neglected to put on his bedroom slippers, of course, and in his bare feet be padded across the room to the study door. It was not entirely dark. A night-light burned there. It stood on a table directly under the two crossed swords. Beneath the swords, in a burnt-wood frame, were the pictures of his father and mother. Hedwig had given him a wood-burning outfit at Christmas, and he had done the work himself. It consisted of the royal arms, somewhat out of drawing and not exactly in the center of the frame, and a floral border of daisies, extremely geometrical, because he had drawn them in first with a compass.

The boy, however, gave the pictures only a hasty glance and proceeded, in a business-like manner, to carry a straight chair to the cabinet. On the top shelf sat the old cloth dog. Its shoe-button eyes looked glazed with sleep, but its ears were quite alert. Very cautiously the Crown Prince unlocked the door, stepped precariously to the lower shelf of the cabinet, hung there by one royal hand, and lifted the dog down.

At nine o’clock the wet-nurse took off his sword in another room and leaned it against a chair. Then he examined his revolver, in accordance with a formula prescribed by the old King. Then he went in and examined the room with a flashlight, and listened to the Crown Prince’s breathing. He had been a croupy baby. And, at last, he turned the flashlight on to the bed. A pair of shoe-button eyes stared at him from the pillow.

“Well, I’m damned,” said the wet-nurse And went out, looking thoughtful.

In a shop where, that afternoon, the Countess had purchased some Lyons silks, one of the clerks, Peter Niburg, was free at last. At seven o’clock, having put away the last rolls of silk on the shelves behind him, and covered them with calico to keep off the dust; having given a final glance of disdain at the clerk in the linens, across; having reached under the counter for his stiff black hat of good quality and his silver-topped cane; having donned the hat and hung the stick to his arm with two swaggering gestures; having prepared his offensive, so to speak, he advanced.

Between Peter Niburg and Herman Spier of the linens, was a feud. Its source, in the person of a pretty cashier, had gone, but the feud remained. It was of the sort that smiles with the lips and scowls with the eyes, that speaks pleasantly quite awful things, although it was Peter Niburg who did most of the talking. Herman Spier was a moody individual, given to brooding. A man who stood behind his linens, and hated with his head down.

And he hated Peter. God, how he hated him! The cashier was gone, having married a restaurant keeper, and already she waxed fat. But Herman’s hatred grew with the days. And business being bad, much of the time he stood behind his linens and thought about a certain matter, which was this:

How did Peter Niburg do it?

They were paid the same scant wage. Each Monday they stood together, Peter smiling and he frowning, and received into open palms exactly enough to live on, without extras. And each Monday Peter pocketed his cheerfully, and went back to his post, twirling his mustache as though all the money of the realm jingled in his trousers.

To accept the inevitable, to smile over one’s poverty, that is one thing. But there was more to it. Peter made his money go amazingly far. It was Peter, for instance, who on name-days had been able to present the little cashier with a nosegay. Which had, by the way, availed him nothing against the delicatessen offerings of the outside rival. When, the summer before, the American Scenic Railway had opened to the public, with much crossing of flags, the national emblem and the Stars and Stripes, it was Peter who had invited the lady to an evening of thrills on that same railway at a definite sum per thrill. Nay, more, as Herman had seen with his own eyes, taken her afterward to a coffee-house, and shared with her a litre of white wine. A litre, no less.

Herman himself had been to the Scenic Railway, but only because he occupied a small room in the house where the American manager lived. The manager had given tickets to Black Humbert, the concierge, but Humbert was busy with other thing, and was, besides, chary of foreign deviltries. So he had passed the tickets on.

It was Peter, then, who made the impossible possible, who wore good clothes and did not have his boots patched, who went, rumor said, to the Opera now and then, and followed the score on his own battered copy.

How?

Herman Spier had suspected him of many things; had secretly audited his cash slips; had watched him for surreptitious parcels of silk. Once he had thought he had him. But the package of Lyons silk, opened by the proprietor at Herman’s suggestion, proved to be material for a fancy waistcoat, and paid for by Peter Niburg’s own hand.

With what? Herman stood confused, even confounded, but still suspicious. And now, this very day, he had stumbled on something. A great lady from the Court had made a purchase, and had left, under a roll of silk, a letter. There was no mistake. And Peter Niburg had put away the silk, and pocketed the letter, after a swift glance over the little shop.

An intrigue, then, with Peter Niburg as the go-between, or—something else. Something vastly more important, the discovery of which would bring Herman prominence beyond his fellows in a certain secret order to which he belonged.

In a way, he was a stupid man, this pale-eyed clerk who sold the quaint red and yellow cottons of the common people side by side with the heavy linens that furnished forth the tables of the rich. But hatred gave him wits. Gave him speed, too. He was only thirty feet behind Peter Niburg when that foppish gentleman reached the corner.

Herman was skilled in certain matters. He knew, for instance, that a glance into a shop window, a halt to tie a shoe, may be a ruse for passing a paper to other hands. But Peter did not stop. He went, not more swiftly than usual, to his customary restaurant, one which faced over the Square and commanded a view of the Palace. And there he settled himself in a window and ordered his dinner.

From the outside Herman stared in. He did not dine there. It was, for one thing, a matter of bitterness to see sitting at the cashier’s high desk, the little Marie, grown somewhat with flesh, it is true, but still lovely in his eyes. It made Herman wince, even now, to see through the window that her husband patted her hand as he brought her money to be changed.

He lurked in the shadows outside, and watched. Peter sat alone. He had bowed very stiffly to Marie, and had passed the desk with his chest out. She had told him once that he had a fine figure.

Peter sat alone, and stared out. Herman took shelter, and watched. But Peter Niburg did not see him. His eyes were fixed on the gloomy mass across, shot with small lights from deep windows, which was the Palace.

Peter was calm. He had carried many such letters as the one now hidden in his breast pocket. No conscience stirred in him. If he did not do this work, others would. He shrugged his shoulders. He drank his brandy, and glanced at Marie. He found her eyes on him. Pretty eyes they still were, and just now speculative. He smiled at her, but she averted her head, and colored. Many things filled Peter Niburg’s mind. If now she was not happy, what then? Her husband adored her. It was fatal. A woman should not be too sure of a husband. And probably he bored her. Another six months, and perhaps she would not turn away her head.

He had until midnight. At that hour a messenger would receive the letter from him in the colonnade of the cathedral. On this night, each week, the messenger waited. Sometimes there was a letter, sometimes none. That was all. It was amazingly simple, and for it one received the difference between penury and comfort.

Seeing Peter settled, a steaming platter before him, Herman turned and hurried through the night. This which he had happened on was a big thing, too big for him alone. Two heads were better than one. He would take advice.

Off the main avenue he fell into a smart trot. The color came to his pale cheeks. A cold sweat broke out over him. He was short of wind from many cigarettes. But at last he reached the house. It was near the park. Although the season was early spring and there was more than a hint of winter in the air, the Scenic Railway, he perceived, was already open for business. Certainly the Americans were enterprising.

The double doors of the tall, gloomy house on the Road of Good Children were already closed for the evening. As he stood panting, after he had rung the bell, Herman Spier could look across to that remote and unfashionable end of the great park where the people played on pleasant evenings, and where even now, on the heels of winter, the Scenic Railway made a pretense at summer.

The sight recalled that other vision of Marie and Peter Niburg, snugly settled in a car, Marie a trifle pale and apprehensive. Herman swore softly; and opened the doors.

Black Humbert was not in his bureau, behind the grating. With easy familiarity Herman turned to a door beyond and entered. A dirty little room, it was littered now with the preparations for a meal. On the bare table were a loaf, a jug of beer, and a dish of fried veal. The concierge was at the stove making gravy in a frying-pan—a huge man, bearded and heavy of girth, yet stepping lightly, like a cat. A dark man and called “the Black,” he yet revealed, on full glance, eyes curiously pale and flat.

No greeting passed between them. Humbert gave his visitor a quick glance. Herman closed the door, and wiped out the band of his hat. The concierge poured the gravy over the meat.

“I have discovered something, something,” Herman said. “As to its value, I know nothing, or its use to us.”

“Let me judge that.” But the concierge was unmoved, by Herman’s excitement. He dealt in sensations. His daily tools were men less clever than himself, men who constantly made worthless discoveries. And it was the dinner hour. His huge body was crying for food.

“It is a matter of a letter.”

“Sit down, man, and tell it. Or do you wish me to draw the information, like bad teeth?”

“A letter from the Palace,” said Herman. And explained.

Black Humbert listened. He was skeptical, but not entirely incredulous. He knew the Court—none better. The women of the Court wrote many letters. He saw a number of them, through one of his men in the post office. There were many intrigues. After all, who could blame them? The Court was dreary enough these days, and if they chose to amuse themselves as best they could—one must make allowances.

“A liaison!” he said at last, with his mouth full. “The Countess is handsome, and bored. Annunciata is driving her to wickedness, as she drove her husband. But it is worth consideration. Even the knowledge of an intrigue is often helpful. Of what size was the letter?”

“A small envelope. I saw no more.”

The concierge reflected. “The Countess uses a gray paper with a coronet.”

“This was white.”

Black Humbert reflected. “There is, of course, a chance that he has already passed this on. But even if so, there will be others. The Countess comes often to the shop?”

“Once in a week, perhaps.”

“So.” The big man rose, and untied his soiled apron. “Go back,” he said, “and enter the restaurant. Order a small meal, that you may have finished when he does. Leave with him and suggest the Hungaria.”

“Hungaria! I have no money.”

“You will need no money. Now, mark this. At a certain corner you will be attacked and robbed. A mere form,” he added, as he saw Herman’s pallid face go whiter. “For the real envelope will be substituted another. In his breast-pocket, you said. Well, then suggest going to his room. He may,” added the concierge grimly, “require your assistance. Leave him at his lodging, but watch the house. It is important to know to whom he delivers these letters.”

As the man stood, he seemed to the cowering Herman to swell until he dominated the room. He took on authority. To Herman came suddenly the memory of a hidden room, and many men, and one, huge and towering, who held the others in the hollow of his hand. Herman turned to go, but at the door the concierge stopped him.

“A moment,” he said. “We will select first the shape and fashion of this envelope you saw. These matters require finesse.”

He disappeared, returning shortly with a wooden box, filled to the top with old envelopes. Each had been neatly opened and its contents extracted. And on each was neatly penned in a corner the name of the sender. Herman watched while the concierge dug through it.

“Here it is,” he said at last. “The Countess, to her aunt in a nunnery and relating to wool knitting. See, is this the sort of envelope?”

“That is gray,” Herman Spier said sullenly.

“But in size?”

“It is similar.”

“Good.” He held the envelope to the light and inspected it. “It would be interesting to know,” he said, “whether the Countess has an aunt in this nunnery, or whether—but go, man. And hurry.”

Left alone, he got together pens, ink, and carbon paper. He worked awkwardly, his hands too large for the pen, his elbows spread wide over the table. But the result was fair. He surveyed it with satisfaction.

Meanwhile, back went Herman over his earlier route. But now he did not run. His craven knees shook beneath him. Fresh sweat, not of haste but of fear, broke out over him. He who was brave enough of tongue in the meetings, who was capable of rising to heights of cruelty that amounted to ferocity when one of a mob, was a coward alone.

However, the sight of the restaurant, and of his fellow clerk eating calmly, quieted him. Peter Niburg was still alone. Herman took a table near him, and ordered a bowl of soup. His hands shook, but the hot food revived him. After all, it was simple enough. But, of course, it hinged entirely on his fellow-clerk’s agreeing to accompany him.

He glanced across. Peter Niburg was eating, but his eyes were fixed on Madame Marie, at her high desk. There was speculation in them, and something else. Triumph, perhaps.

Suddenly Herman became calm. Calm with hate.

And, after all, it was very easy. Peter Niburg was lonely. The burden of the letter oppressed him. He wanted the comfort of human conversation and the reassurance of a familiar face. When the two met at—the rack by the door which contained their hats, his expression was almost friendly. They went out together.

“A fine night,” said Herman, and cast an eye at the sky.

“Fine enough.”

“Too good to waste in sleep. I was thinking,” observed Herman, “of an hour or two at the Hungaria.”

The Hungaria! Something in Peter’s pleasure-hungry heart leaped, but he mocked his fellow-clerk.

“Since when,” he inquired, “have you frequented the Hungaria?

“I feel in the mood,” was the somewhat sullen reply. “I work hard enough, God knows, to have a little pleasure now and then.” Danger was making him shrewd. He turned away from Peter Niburg, then faced him again. “If you care to come,” he suggested. “Not a supper, you understand; but a glass of wine, Italian champagne,” he added.

Peter Niburg was fond of sweet champagne.

Peter Niburg pushed his hat to the back of his head, and hung his stick over his forearm. After all, why not? Marie was gone. Let the past die. If Herman could make the first move, let him, Peter, make the second. He linked arms with his old enemy.

“A fine night,” he said.

Dinner was over in the dull old dining-room. The Archduchess Annunciata lighted a cigarette, and glanced across the table at Hedwig.

Hedwig had been very silent during the meal. She had replied civilly when spoken to, but that was all. Her mother, who had caught the Countess’s trick of narrowing her eyes, inspected her from under lowered lids.

“Well?” she said. “Are you still sulky?”

“I? Not at all, mother.” Her head went up, and she confronted her mother squarely.

“I should like to inquire, if I may,” observed the Archduchess, “just how you have spent the day until the little divertissement on which I stumbled. This morning, for instance?”

Hedwig shrugged her shoulders, but her color rose. It came in a soft wave over her neck and mounted higher and higher. “Very quietly, mother,” she said.

“Naturally. It is always quiet here. But how?”

“I rode.”

“Where?”

“At the riding-school, with Otto.”

“Only with Otto?”

“Captain Larisch was there.”

“Of course! Then you have practically spent the day with him!”

“I have spent most of the day with Otto.”

“This devotion to Otto—it is new, I think. You were eager to get out of the nursery. Now, it appears, you must fly back to schoolroom teas and other absurdities. I should like to know why.”

“I think Otto is lonely, mother.”

Hilda took advantage of her mother’s preoccupation to select another peach. She was permitted only one, being of the age when fruit caused her, colloquially speaking, to “break out.” She was only faintly interested in the conversation. She dreaded these family meals, with her mother’s sharp voice and the Countess Loschek’s almost too soft one. But now a restrained irritability in the tones of the Archduchess made her glance up. The Archduchess was in one of her sudden moods of irritation. Hedwig’s remark about Otto’s loneliness, the second that day, struck home. In her anger she forgot her refusal to the Chancellor.

“I have something to say that will put an end to this sentimental nonsense of yours, Hedwig. I should forbid your seeing this boy, this young Larisch, if I felt it necessary. I do not. You would probably see him anyhow, for that matter. Which, as I observed this afternoon, also reminds me unpleasantly of your father.” She rose, and threw her bolt out of a clear sky. She had had, as a matter of fact, no previous intention of launching any bolt. It was wholly a result of irritation. “It is unnecessary to remind you not to make a fool of yourself. But it may not be out of place to say that your grandfather has certain plans for you that will take your mind away from this—this silly boy, soon enough.”

Hedwig had risen, and was standing, very white, with her hands on the table. “What plans, mother?”

“He will tell you.”

“Not—I am not to be married?”

The Archduchess Annunciata was not all hard. She could never forgive her children their father. They reminded her daily of a part of her life that she would have put behind her. But they were her children, and Hedwig was all that she was not, gentle and round and young. Suddenly something almost like regret stirred in her.

“Don’t look like that, child,” she said. “It is not settled. And, after all, one marriage or another what difference does it make! Men are men. If one does not care, it makes the things they do unimportant.”

“But surely,” Hedwig gasped, “surely I shall be consulted?”

Annunciata shook her head. They had all risen and Hilda was standing, the peach forgotten, her mouth a little open. As for Olga Loschek, she was very still, but her eyes burned. The Archduchess remembered her presence no more than that of the flowers on the table.

“Mother, you cannot look back, and—and remember your own life, and allow me to be wretched. You cannot!”

Hilda picked up her peach. It was all very exciting, but Hedwig was being rather silly. Besides, why was she so distracted when she did not know who the man was? It might be some quite handsome person. For Hilda was also at the age when men were handsome or not handsome, and nothing else.

Unexpectedly Hedwig began to cry. This Hilda considered going much too far, and bad taste into the bargain. She slipped the peach into the waist of her frock.

The Archduchess hated tears, and her softer moments were only moments. “Dry your eyes, and don’t be silly,” she said coldly. “You have always known that something of the sort was inevitable.”

She moved toward the door. The two princesses and her lady in waiting remained still until she had left the table. Then they fell in behind her, and the little procession moved to the stuffy, boudoir, for coffee. But Hilda slipped her arm around her sister’s waist, and the touch comforted Hedwig.

“He may be very nice,” Hilda volunteered cautiously. “Perhaps it is Karl. I am quite mad about Karl, myself.”

Hedwig, however, was beyond listening. She went slowly to a window, and stood gazing out. Looming against the sky-line, in the very center of the Place, was the heroic figure of her dead grandmother. She fell to wondering about these royal women who had preceded her. Her mother, frankly unhappy in her marriage, permanently embittered; her grandmother. Hedwig had never seen the King young. She could not picture him as a lover. To her he was a fine and lonely figure. But romantic? Had he ever been romantic?

He had made her mother’s marriage, and had lived to regret it. He would make hers. But what about the time when he himself had taken a wife? Hedwig gazed at the statue. Had she too come with unwilling arms? And if she had, was it true that after all, in a year or a lifetime, it made no difference.

She slipped out on to the balcony and closed the curtains behind her. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness she saw that there was some one below, under the trees. Her heart beat rapidly. In a moment she was certain. It was Nikky down there, Nikky, gazing up at her as a child may look at a star. With a quick gesture Hedwig drew the curtain back. A thin ray of light fell on her, on her slim bare arms, on her light draperies, on her young face. He had wanted to see her, and he should see her. Then she dropped the curtain, and twisted her hands together lest, in spite of her, they reach out toward him.

Did she fancy it, or did the figure salute her? Then came the quick ring of heels on the old stone pavement. She knew his footsteps, even as she knew every vibrant, eager inflection of his voice. He went away, across the Square, like one who, having bent his knee to a saint, turns back to the business of the world.

In the boudoir the Archduchess had picked up some knitting to soothe her jangled nerves. “You may play now, Hilda,” she said.

Into Hilda’s care-free young life came two bad hours each day. One was the dinner hour, when she ate under her mother’s pitiless eyes. The other was the hour after dinner, when, alone in the white drawing-room beyond the boudoir, with the sliding doors open, she sat at the grand piano, which was white and gold, like the room, and as cold, and played to her mother’s pitiless ears.

She went slowly into the drawing-room. Empty, it was a dreary place. The heavy chandeliers of gold and cut glass were unlighted. The crimson and gilt chairs were covered with white linen. Only the piano, a gleaming oasis in a desert of polished floor, was lighted, and that by two tall candles in gilt candlesticks that reached from the floor. Hilda, going reluctantly to her post, was the only bit of life and color in the room.

At last Annunciata dozed, and Hilda played softly. Played now, not for her mother, but for herself. And as she played she dreamed: of Hedwig’s wedding, of her own debut, of Karl, who had fed her romantic heart by treating her like a woman grown.

The Countess’s opportunity had come. She put down the dreary embroidery with which she filled the drearier evenings, and moved to the window. She walked quietly, like a cat.

Her first words to Hedwig were those of Peter Niburg as he linked arms with his enemy and started down the street. “A fine night, Highness,” she said.

Hedwig raised her eyes to the stars. “It is very lovely.”

“A night to spend out-of-doors, instead of being shut up—” She finished her, sentence with a shrug of the shoulders.

Hedwig was not fond of the Countess. She did not know why. The truth being, of course, that between them lay the barrier of her own innocence. Hedwig could not have put this into words, would not, indeed, if she could. But when the Countess’s arm touched hers, she drew aside.

“To-night,” said the lady in waiting dreamily, “I should like to be in a motor, speeding over mountain roads. I come from the mountains, you know. And I miss them.”

Hedwig said nothing; she wished to be alone with her trouble.

“In my home, at this time of the year,” the Countess went on, still softly, “they are driving the cattle up into the mountains for the summer. At night one hears them going—a bell far off, up the mountainside, and sometimes one sees the light of a lantern.”

Hedwig moved, a little impatiently, but as the Countess went on, she listened. After all, Nikky, too, came from the mountains. She saw it all—the great herds moving with deliberate eagerness already sniffing the green slopes above, and the star of the distant lantern. She could even hear the thin note of the bell. And because she was sorry for the Countess, who was homesick, and perhaps because just then she had to speak to some one, she turned to her at last with the thing that filled her mind.

“This marriage,” she said bitterly. “Is it talked about? Am I the only one in the palace who has not known about it?”

“No, Highness, I had heard nothing.”

“But you knew about it?”

“Only what I heard to-night. Of course, there are always rumors.”

“As to the other, the matter my mother referred to,” Hedwig held her head very high, “I—she was unjust. Am I never to have any friends?”

The Countess turned and, separating the curtains, surveyed the room within. Annunciata was asleep, and beyond, Hilda was playing dreamily, and very softly, as behooves one whose bedtime is long past. When the Countess dropped the curtain, she turned abruptly to Hedwig.

“Friends, Highness? One may have friends, of course. It is not friendship they fear.”

“What then?”

“A lover,” said the Countess softly. “It is impossible to see Captain Larisch in your presence, and not realize—”

“Go on.”

“And not realize, Highness, that he is in love with you.”

“How silly!” said the Princess Hedwig, with glowing eyes.

“But Highness!” implored the Countess. “If only you would use a little caution. Open defiance is its own defeat.”

“I am not ashamed of what I do,” said Hedwig hotly.

“Ashamed! Of course not. But things that are harmless in others, in your position—you are young. You should have friends, gayety. I am,” she smiled grimly in the darkness, “not so old myself but that I can understand.”

“Who told my mother that I was having tea with—with Prince Otto?”

“These things get about. Where there is no gossip, there are plenty to invent it. And—pardon, Highness—frankness, openness, are not always understood.”

Hedwig stood still. The old city was preparing for sleep. In the Place a few lovers loitered, standing close, and the faint tinkling of a bell told of the Blessed Sacrament being carried through the streets to some bedside of the dying. Soon the priest came into view, walking rapidly, with his skirts flapping around his legs. Before him marched a boy, ringing a bell and carrying a lighted lamp. The priest bent his steps through the Place, and the lovers kneeled as he passed by. The Princess Hedwig bowed her head.

It seemed to her, all at once, that the world was full of wretchedness and death, and of separation, which might be worse than death. The lamp, passing behind trees, shone out fitfully. The bell tinkled—a thin, silvery sound that made her heart ache.

“I wish I could help you, Highness,” said the Countess. “I should like to see you happy. But happiness does not come of itself. We must fight for it.”

“Fight? What chance have I to fight?” Hedwig asked scornfully.

“One thing, of course, I could do,” pursued the Countess. “On those days when you wish to have tea with—His Royal Highness, I could arrange, perhaps, to let you know if any member of the family intended going to his apartments.”

It was a moment before Hedwig comprehended. Then she turned to her haughtily. “When I wish to have tea with my cousin,” she said coldly, “I shall do it openly, Countess.”

She left the balcony abruptly, abandoning the Countess to solitary fury, the greater because triumph had seemed so near. Alone, she went red and white, bit her lips, behaved according to all the time-honored traditions. And even swore—in a polite, lady-in-waiting fashion, to be sure—to get even.

Royalties, as she knew well, were difficult to manage. They would go along perfectly well, and act like human beings, and rage and fuss and grieve, and even weep. And then, quite unexpectedly, the royal streak would show. But royalties in love were rather rare in her experience. Love was, generally speaking, not a royal attribute. Apparently it required a new set of rules.

Altogether, the Countess Loschek worked herself to quite as great a fury as if her motives had been purely altruistic, and not both selfish and wicked.

That night, while the Prince Ferdinand William Otto hugged the woolen dog in his sleep; while the Duchess Hilda, in front of her dressing-table, was having her hair brushed; while Nikky roamed the streets and saw nothing but the vision of a girl on a balcony, a girl who was lost to him, although she had never been anything else, Hedwig on her knees at the prie-dieu in her dressing-room followed the example of the Chancellor, who, too, had felt himself in a tight corner, as one may say, and was growing tired of putting his trust in princes. So Hedwig prayed for many things: for the softening of hard hearts; for Nikky’s love; and, perhaps a trifle tardily, for the welfare and recovery of her grandfather, the King. But mostly she prayed for happiness, for a bit of light and warmth in her gray days—to be allowed to live and love.

Things were going very wrong for Nikky Larisch.

Not handsome, in any exact sense, was Nikky, but tall and straight, with a thatch of bright hair not unlike that of the Crown Prince, and as unruly. Tall and straight, and occasionally truculent, with a narrow rapier scar on his left cheek to tell the story of wild student days, and with two clear young eyes that had looked out humorously at the world until lately. But Nikky was not smiling at the world these days.

Perhaps, at the very first, he had been in love with the princess, not the woman. It had been rather like him to fix on the unattainable and worship it from afar. Because, for all the friendliness of their growing intimacy, Hedwig was still a star, whose light touched him, but whose warmth was not for him. He would have died fighting for her with a smile on his lips. There had been times when he almost wished he might. He used to figure out pleasant little dramas, in which, fallen on the battlefield, his last word, uttered in all reverence, was her name. But he had no hope of living for her, unless, of course, she should happen to need him, which was most unlikely. He had no vanity whatever, although in parade dress, with white gloves, he hoped he cut a decent figure.

So she had been his star, and as cold and remote. And then, that very morning, whether it was the new cross-saddle suit or whatever it was, Hedwig had been thrown. Not badly—she was too expert for that. As a matter of fact, feeling herself going, she had flung two strong young arms around her horse’s neck, and had almost succeeded in lighting on her feet. It was not at all dramatic.

But Nikky’s heart had stopped beating. He had lifted her up from where she sat, half vexed and wholly ashamed, and carried her to a chair. That was all. But when it was all over, and Hedwig was only a trifle wobbly and horribly humiliated, Nikky Larisch knew the truth about himself, knew that he was in love with the granddaughter of his King, and that under no conceivable circumstances would he ever be able to tell her so. Knew, then, that happiness and he had said a long farewell, and would thereafter travel different roads.

It had stunned him. He had stood quite still and thought about it. And Prince Ferdinand William Otto had caught him in the act of thinking; and had stood before him and surveyed him anxiously.

“You needn’t look so worried, you know,” he protested. “She’s not really hurt.”

Nikky came back, but slowly. He had in a few seconds already traveled a long way along the lonely road. But he smiled down at the little Prince.

“But she might have been, you know. It—it rather alarmed me.”

Prince Ferdinand William Otto was for continuing the subject. He blamed the accident on the new riding-suit, and was royally outspoken about it. “And anyhow,” he finished, “I don’t like her in boy’s clothes. Half of her looks like a girl, and the rest doesn’t.”

Nikky, letting his eyes rest on her, realized that all of her to him was wonderful, and forever beyond reach.

So that night he started out to think things over. Probably never before in his life had he deliberately done such a thing. He had never, as a fact, thought much at all. It had been his comfortable habit to let the day take care of itself. Beyond minor problems of finance—minor because his income was trifling—he had considered little. In the last border war he had distinguished himself only when it was a matter of doing, not of thinking.

He was very humble about himself. His young swagger was a sort of defiance. And he was not subtle. Taken suddenly, through the Chancellor’s favor, into the circles of the Court, its intrigues and poisoned whispers passed him by. He did not know they existed. And he had one creed, and only one: to love God, honor the King, and live like a gentleman.

On this boy, then, with the capacity for suffering of his single-minded type, had fallen the mantle of trouble. It puzzled him. He did not exactly know what to do about it. And it hurt. It hurt horribly.

That night, following the Archduchess’s confidence, he had stood under the Palace windows, in the Place, and looked up. Not that he expected to see Hedwig. He did it instinctively, turning toward her hidden presence with a sort of bewildered yearning. Across his path, as he turned away, had passed the little procession of the priest and the Sacrament. He knelt, as did the lovers and the passers-by, and when he got up he followed the small flame of the lamp with his eyes as far as he could see it.

This was life, then. One lived and suffered and yearned, and then came death. Were there barriers of rank over there? Or were all equal, so that those who had loved on earth without hope might meet face to face? The tinkle of the bell grew fainter. This weight that he carried, it would be his all his life. And then, one day, he too would hear the bell coming nearer and nearer, and he would die, without having lived.

But he was young, and the night was crisp and beautiful. He took a long breath, and looked up at the stars. After all, things might not be so bad. Hedwig might refuse this marriage. They were afraid that she would, or why have asked his help? When he thought of King Karl, he drew himself up; and his heels rang hard on the pavement. Karl! A hard man and a good king—that was Karl. And old. From the full manhood of his twenty-three years Nikky surveyed Karl’s almost forty, and considered it age.

But soon he was bitter again, bitter and jealous. Back there in the palace they were plotting their own safety, and making a young girl pay for it. He swore softly.

It was typical of Nikky to decide that he needed a hard walk. He translated most of his emotions into motion. So he set off briskly, turning into the crowded part of the city. Here were narrow, winding streets; old houses that overhung above and almost touched, shutting out all but a thin line of sky; mediaeval doorways of heavy oak and iron that opened into courtyards, where once armed men had lounged, but where now broken wagons and other riffraff were stored.

And here it was that Nikky happened on the thing that was to take him far that night, and bring about many curious things. Not far ahead of him two men were talking. They went slowly, arm in arm. One was talking loquaciously, using his free arm, on which hung a cane, to gesticulate. The other walked with bent head.

Nikky, pausing to light a cigarette, fell behind. But the wind was tricky, and with his third match he stepped into a stone archway, lighted his cigarette, buttoned his tunic high against the chill, and emerged to a silent but violent struggle just ahead. The two men had been attacked by three others, and as he stared, the loquacious one went down. Instantly a huge figure of a man outlined against the light from a street-lamp, crouched over the prostrate form of the fallen man. Even in the imperceptible second before he started to run toward the group, Nikky saw that the silent one, unmolested, was looking on.

A moment later he was in the thick of things and fighting gloriously. His soldierly cap fell off. His fair hair bristled with excitement. He flung out arms that were both furious and strong, and with each blow the group assumed a new formation. Unluckily, a great deal of the fighting was done over the prostrate form of Peter Niburg.

Suddenly one of the group broke away, and ran down the street. He ran rather like a kangaroo, gathering his feet under him and proceeding by a series of leaps, almost as if he were being shamefully pricked from behind. At a corner he turned pale, terror-stricken eyes back on that sinister group, and went on into the labyrinth of small streets.

But disaster, inglorious disaster, waited for Nikky. Peter Niburg, face down on the pavement, was groaning, and Nikky had felled one man and was starting on a second with the fighting appetite of twenty-three, when something happened. One moment Nikky was smiling, with a cut lip, and hair in his eyes, and the next he was dropped like an ox, by a blow from behind. Landing between his shoulder-blades, it jerked his head back with a snap, and sent him reeling. A second followed, delivered by a huge fist.

Down went Nikky, and lay still.

The town slept on. Street brawls were not uncommon, especially in the neighborhood of the Hungaria. Those who roused grumbled about quarrelsome students, and slept again.

Perhaps two minutes later, Nikky got up. He was another minute in locating himself. His cap lay in the gutter. Beside him, on his back, lay a sprawling and stertorous figure, with, so quick the downfall, a cane still hooked to his arm.

Nikky bent over Peter Niburg. Bending over made his head ache abominably.

“Here, man!” he said. “Get up! Rouse yourself!”

Peter Niburg made an inarticulate reference to a piece of silk of certain quality, and lay still. But his eyes opened slowly, and he stared up at the stars. “A fine night,” he said thickly. “A very fine—” Suddenly he raised himself to a sitting posture. Terror gave him strength. “I’ve been robbed,” he said. “Robbed. I am ruined. I am dead.”

“Tut,” said Nikky, mopping his cut lip. “If you are dead, your spirit speaks with an uncommonly lusty voice! Come, get up. We present together a shameful picture of defeat.”

But he raised Peter Niburg gently from the ground and, finding his knees unstable, from fright or weakness, stood him against a house wall. Peter Niburg, with rolling eyes, felt for his letter, and, the saints be praised, found it.

“Ah!” he said, and straightened up. “After all it is not so bad as I feared. They got nothing.”

He made a manful effort to walk, but tottered reeled. Nikky caught him.

“Careful!” he said. “The colossus was doubtless the one who got us boxy, and we are likely to feel his weight for some time. Where do you live?”

Peter Niburg was not for saying. He would have preferred to pursue his solitary if uncertain way. But Nikky was no half Samaritan. Toward Peter Niburg’s lodging, then, they made a slow progress.

“These recent gentlemen,” said Nikky, as they rent along, “they are, perhaps, personal enemies?”

“I do not know. I saw nothing.”

“One was very large, a giant of a man. Do you now such a man?”

Peter Niburg reflected. He thought not. “But I know why they came,” he said unguardedly. “Some early morning, my friend, you will hear of man lying dead in the street, That man will be I.”

“The thought has a moral,” observed Nikky. “Do not trust yourself out-of-doors at night.”

But he saw that Peter Niburg kept his hand over breast-pocket.

Never having dealt in mysteries, Nikky was slow recognizing one. But, he reflected, many things were going on in the old city in these troubled days.

Came to Nikky, all at once; that this man on his arm might be one of the hidden eyes of Government.

“These are difficult times,” he ventured, “for those who are loyal.”

Peter Niburg gave him a sidelong glance. “Difficult indeed,” he said briefly.

“But,” said Nikky, “perhaps we fear too much. The people love the boy Prince. And without the people revolution can accomplish nothing.”

“Nothing at all,” assented Peter Niburg.

“I think,” Nikky observed, finding his companion unresponsive, “that, after I see you safely home, I shall report this small matter to the police. Surely there cannot be in the city many such gorillas as our friend with the beard and the huge body.”

But here Peter Niburg turned even paler. “Not—not the police!” he stammered.

“But why? You and I, my friend, will carry their insignia for some days. I have a mind to pay our debts.”

Peter Niburg considered. He stopped and faced Nikky. “I do not wish the police,” he said. “Perhaps I have said too little. This is a private matter. An affair of jealousy.”

“I see!”

“Naturally, not a matter for publicity.”

“Very well,” Nikky assented. But in his mind was rising, dark suspicion. He had stumbled on something. He cursed his stupidity that it meant, so far, nothing more than a mystery to him. He did not pride himself on his intelligence.

“You were not alone, I think?”

Peter Niburg suddenly remembered Herman, and stopped.

“Your friend must have escaped.”

“He would escape,” said Peter Niburg scornfully. “He is of the type that runs.”

He lapsed into sullen silence. Soon he paused before a quiet house, one of the many which housed in cavernous depths uncounted clerks and other small fry of the city. “Good-night to you,” said Peter Niburg. Then, rather tardily. “And my thanks. But for you I should now—” he shrugged his shoulders.

“Good-night, friend,” said Nikky. “And better keep your bed to-morrow.”

He had turned away, and Peter Niburg entered the house.

Nikky inspected himself in the glow of a street lamp. Save for some dust, and a swollen lip, which he could not see, he was not unpresentable. Well enough, anyhow, for the empty streets. But before he started he looked the house and the neighborhood over carefully. He might wish to return to that house.

For two hours he walked, and resumed his interrupted train of thought—past the gloomy University buildings, past the quay, where sailed the vessels that during peaceful times went along the Ar through the low lands of Karnia to the sea. At last, having almost circled the city, he came to the Cathedral. It was nearly midnight by the clock in the high tower. He stopped and consulted his watch. The fancy took him to go up the high steps, and look out over the city from the colonnade.

Once there, he stood leaning against a column, looking out. The sleeping town appealed to him. Just so had it lain in old feudal times, clustered about the church and the Palace, and looking to both for protection. It had grown since then, had extended beyond the walls which sheltered it, had now destroyed those walls and, filling in the moat, had built thereon its circling parks. And other things had changed. No longer, he reflected gloomily, did it look to the palace, save with tolerance and occasional disloyalty. The old order was changing. And, with all his hot young heart, Nikky was for the old order.

There was some one coming along the quiet streets, with a stealthy, shuffling gait that caught his attention. So, for instance, might a weary or a wounded man drag along. Exactly so, indeed, had Peter Niburg shambled into his house but two hours gone.

The footsteps paused, hesitated, commenced a painful struggle up the ascent. Nikky moved behind his column, and waited. Up and up, weary step after weary step. The shadowy figure, coming close, took a form, became a man—became Peter Niburg.

Now, indeed, Nikky roused. Beaten and sorely bruised, Peter Niburg should have been in bed. What stealthy business of the night brought him out?

Fortunately for Nikky’s hiding-place, the last step or two proved too much for the spy. He groaned, and sat down painfully, near the top. His head lolled forward, and he supported it on two shaking hands. Thus he sat, huddled and miserable, for five minutes or thereabouts. The chime rang out overhead the old hymn which the little Crown Prince so often sang to it:

Time had gone since the old church stood in a desert drear and wild, but still its chimes rang the old petition, hour after hour.

At ten minutes past the hour, Nikky heard the engine of an automobile. No machine came in sight, but the throbbing kept on, from which he judged that a car had been stopped around the corner. Peter Niburg heard it, and rose. A moment later a man, with the springiness of youth, mounted the steps and confronted the messenger.

Nikky saw a great light. When Peter Niburg put his hand to his breast-pocket, there was no longer room for doubt, nor, for that matter, time for thinking. As a matter of fact, never afterward could Nikky recall thinking at all. He moved away quietly, hidden by the shadows of the colonnade. Behind him, on the steps, the two men were talking. Peter Niburg’s nasal voice had taken on a whining note. Short, gruff syllables replied. Absorbed in themselves and their business, they neither heard nor saw the figure that slipped through the colonnade, and dropped, a bloodcurdling drop, from the high end of it to the street below.

Nikky’s first impulse, beside the car, was to cut a tire. By getting his opponent into a stooping position; over the damaged wheel, it would be easier to overcome him. But a hasty search revealed that he had lost his knife in the melee. And second thought gave him a better plan. After all, to get the letter was not everything. To know its destination would be important. He had no time to think further. The messenger was coming down the steps, not stealthily, but clattering, with the ring of nails in the heels of heavy boots.

Nikky flung his long length into the tonneau, and there crouched. It was dark enough to conceal him, but Nikky’s was a large body in a small place. However, the chauffeur only glanced at the car, kicked a tire with a practiced foot, and got in.

He headed for the open country. Very soon his passenger knew that he was in for a long ride possibly, a cold ride certainly. Within the city limits the car moved decorously, but when the suburbs were reached, the driver put on all his power. He drove carefully, too, as one who must make haste but cannot afford accident.

Nikky grew very uncomfortable. His long legs ached. The place between the shoulders where the concierge had landed his powerful blows throbbed and beat. Also he was puzzled, and he hated being puzzled. He was unarmed, too. He disliked that most of all. Generally speaking, he felt his position humiliating. He was a soldier, not a spy. His training had been to fight, not to hide and watch.

After a time he raised his head. He made out that they were going east, toward the mountains, and he cursed the luck that had left his revolver at home. Still he had no plan but to watch. Two hours’ ride, at their present rate, would take them over the border and into Karnia.

Nikky, although no thinker, was not a fool, and he knew rather better than most what dangers threatened the country from outside as well. Also, in the back of his impulsive head was a sort of dogged quality that was near to obstinacy. He had started this thing and he would see it through. And as the car approached the border, he began to realize that this was not of the Terrorists at home, but something sinister, abroad.

With a squealing of brakes the machine drew up at the frontier. Here was a chain across the highway, with two sets of guards. Long before they reached it, a sentry stepped into the road and waved his lantern.

Nikky burrowed lower into the car, and attempted to look like a rug. In the silence, while the sentry evidently examined a passport and flashed a lantern over the chauffeur, Nikky cursed the ticking of his watch, the beating of his own heart.

Then came a clanking as the chain dropped in the road. The car bumped over it, and halted again. The same formalities, this time by Karnian sentries. A bit more danger, too, for the captain in charge of the guard asked for matches, and dangled a careless hand over the side, within a few inches of Nikky’s head. Then the jerk following a hasty letting-in of the clutch, and they were off again.

For some time they climbed steadily. But Nikky, who knew the road, bided his time. Then at last, at two o’clock, came the steep ascent to the very crest of the mountain, and a falling-back, gear by gear, until they climbed slowly in the lowest.

Nikky unfolded his length quietly. The gears were grinding, the driver bent low over his wheel. Very deliberately, now that he knew what he was going to do, Nikky unbuttoned his tunic and slipped it off. It was a rash thing, this plan he had in mind, rash under any circumstances, in a moving car particularly rash here, where between the cliff and a precipice that fell far away below, was only a winding ribbon of uneven road.

Here, at the crucial moment, undoubtedly he should have given a last thought to Hedwig. But alas for romance! As a matter of honesty, he had completely forgotten Hedwig. This was his work, and with even the hottest of lovers, work and love are things apart.

So he waited his moment, loveless, as one may say, and then, with one singularly efficient gesture, he flung his tunic over the chauffeur’s head. He drove a car himself, did Nikky—not his own, of course; he was far too poor—and he counted on one thing: an automobile driver acts from the spinal cord, and not from the brain. Therefore his brain may be seething with a thousand frenzies, but he will shove out clutch and brake feet in an emergency, and hold them out.

So it happened. The man’s hands left the wheel, but he stopped his car. Not too soon. Not before it had struck the cliff, and then taken a sickening curve out toward the edge of the precipice. But stop it did, on the very edge of eternity, and the chauffeur held it there.

“Set the hand brake!” Nikky said. The lamps were near enough the edge to make him dizzy.

The chauffeur ceased struggling, and set the hand brake. His head was still covered. But having done that, he commenced a struggle more furious than forceful, for both of them were handicapped. But Nikky had steel-like young arms from which escape was impossible.

And now Nikky was forced to an unsoldier-like thing that he afterward tried to forget. For the driver developed unexpected strength, refused to submit, got the tunic off his head, and, seeing himself attacked by one man only, took courage and fell to. He picked up a wrench from the seat beside him, and made a furious pass at Nikky’s head. Nikky ducked and, after a struggle, secured the weapon. All this in the car, over the seat back.

It was then that Nikky raised the wrench and stunned his man with it. It was hateful. The very dull thud of it was sickening. And there was a bad minute or two when he thought he had killed his opponent. The man had sunk down in his seat, a sodden lump of inanimate human flesh. And Nikky, whose business, in a way, was killing; was horrified.

He tried to find the pulse, but failed—which was not surprising, since he had the wrong side of the wrist. Then the unconscious man groaned. For a moment, as he stood over him, Nikky reflected that he was having rather a murderous night of it.

The chauffeur wakened, ten minutes later, to find himself securely tied with his own towing rope, and lying extremely close to the edge of death. Beside him on the ground sat a steady-eyed young man with a cut lip. The young man had lighted a cigarette, and was placing it carefully in the uninjured side of his mouth.

“Just as soon as you are up to it,” said Nikky, “we shall have a little talk.”

The chauffeur muttered something in the peasant patois of Karnia.

“Come, come!” Nikky observed. “Speak up. No hiding behind strange tongues. But first, I have the letter. That saves your worrying about it. You can clear your mind for action.” Suddenly Nikky dropped his mocking tone. To be quite frank, now that the man was not dead, and Nikky had the letter, he rather fancied himself. But make no mistake—he was in earnest, grim and deadly earnest.

“I have a fancy, my friend,” he said, “to take that letter of yours on to its destination. But what that destination is, you are to tell me.”

The man on the ground grinned sardonically. “You know better than to ask that,” he said. “I will never tell you.”

Nikky had thought things out fairly well, for him, in that ten minutes. In a business-like fashion he turned the prostrate prisoner on his side, so that he faced toward the chasm. A late moon showed its depth, and the valley in which the Ar flowed swiftly. And having thus faced him toward the next world, Nikky, throwing away his cigarette because it hurt his lip, put a stone or two from the roadway behind his prisoner, and anchored him there. Then he sat down and waited. Except that his ears were burning, he was very calm.

“Any news?” he asked, at the end of ten minutes’ unbroken silence.

His—prisoner said nothing. He was thinking, doubtless. Weighing things, too,—perhaps life against betrayal, a family against separation.

Nikky examined the letter again. It was addressed to a border town in Livonia. But the town lay far behind them. The address, then, was a false one. He whistled softly. He was not, as a fact, as calm as he looked. He had never thrown a man over a precipice before, and he disliked the idea. Fortunately, his prisoner did not know this. Besides, suppose he did push him over? Dead men are extremely useless about telling things. It would, as a fact, leave matters no better than before. Rather worse.

Half an hour.

“Come, come,” said Nikky fiercely. “We are losing time.” He looked fierce, too. His swollen lip did that. And he was nervous. It occurred to him that his prisoner, in desperation, might roll over the edge himself, which would be most uncomfortable.

But the precipice, and Nikky’s fierce lip, and other things, had got in their work. The man on the ground stopped muttering in his patois, and turned on Nikky eyes full of hate.

“I will tell you,” he said. “And you will free me. And after that—”

“Certainly,” Nikky replied equably. “You will follow me to the ends of the earth—although that will not be necessary, because I don’t intend to go there—and finish me off.” Then, sternly: “Now, where does the letter go? I have a fancy for delivering it myself.”

“If I tell you, what then?”

“This: If you tell me properly, and all goes well, I will return and release you. If I do not return, naturally you will not be released. And, for fear you meditate a treachery, I shall gag you and leave you, not here, but back a short distance, in the wood we just passed. And, because you are a brave man, and this thing may be less serious than I think it is, I give you my word of honor that, if you advise me correctly, I shall return and liberate you.”

He was very proud of his plan. He had thought it out carefully. He had everything to gain and nothing to lose by it—except, perhaps, his life. The point was, that he knew he could not take a citizen of Karnia prisoner, because too many things would follow, possibly a war.

“It’s a reasonable proposition,” he observed. “If I come back, you are all right. If I do not, there are a number of disagreeable possibilities for you.”

“I have only your word.”

“And I yours,” said Nikky.

The chauffeur took a final glance around; as far as he could see, and a final shuddering look at the valley of the Ar, far below. “I will tell you,” he said sullenly.

Herman Spier had made his escape with the letter. He ran through tortuous byways of the old city, under arches into courtyards, out again by doorway set in walls, twisted, doubled like a rabbit. And all this with no pursuit, save the pricking one of terror.

But at last he halted, looked about, perceived that only his own guilty conscience accused him, and took breath. He made his way to the house in the Road of the Good Children, the letter now buttoned inside his coat, and, finding the doors closed, lurked in the shadow of the park until, an hour later, Black Humbert himself appeared.

He eyed his creature with cold anger. “It is a marvel,” he sneered, “that such flight as yours has not brought the police in a pack at your heels.”

“I had the letter,” Herman replied sulkily. “It was necessary to save it.”

“You were to see where Niburg took the substitute.”

But here Herman was the one to sneer. “Niburg!” he said. “You know well enough that he will take no substitute to-night, or any night, You strike hard, my friend.”

The concierge growled, and together they entered the house across the street.

In the absence of Humbert, his niece, daughter of a milk-seller near, kept the bureau, answered the bell, and after nine o’clock, when the doors were bolted, admitted the various occupants of the house and gave them the tiny tapers with which to light themselves upstairs. She was sewing and singing softly when they entered. Herman Spier’s pale face colored. He suspected the girl of a softness for him, not entirely borne out by the facts. So he straightened his ready-made tie, which hooked to his collar button, and ogled her.

“All right, girl. You may go,” said Humbert. His huge bulk seemed to fill the little room.

“Good-night to you both,” the girl said, and gave Herman Spier a nod. When she was gone, the concierge locked the door behind her.

“And now,” he said, “for a look at the treasure.”

He rubbed his hands together as Herman produced the letter. Heads close, they examined it under the lamp. Then they glanced at each other.

“A cipher,” said the concierge shortly. “It tells nothing.”

It was a moment of intense disappointment. In Humbert’s mind had been forming, for the past hour or two, a plan—nothing less than to go himself before the Council and, with the letter in hand, to point out certain things which would be valuable. In this way he would serve both the party and him-self. Preferment would follow. He could demand, under the corning republic, some high office. Already, of course, he was known to the Committee, and known well, but rather for brawn than brain. They used him. Now— “Code!” he said. And struck the paper with a hairy fist. “Everything goes wrong. That blond devil interferes, and now this letter speaks but of blankets and loaves!”

The bell rang, and, taking care to thrust the letter out of sight, the concierge disappeared. Then ensued, in the hall, a short colloquy, followed by a thumping on the staircase. The concierge returned.

“Old Adelbert, from the Opera,” he said. “He has lost his position, and would have spent the night airing his grievance. But I sent him off!”

Herman turned his pale eyes toward the giant. “So!” he said. And after a pause, “He has some influence among the veterans.”

“And is Royalist to his marrow,” sneered the concierge. He took the letter out again and, bringing a lamp, went over it carefully. It was signed merely “Olga.” “Blankets and loaves!” he fumed.

Now, as between the two, Black Humbert furnished evil and strength, but it was the pallid clerk who furnished the cunning. And now he made a suggestion.

“It is possible,” he said, “that he—upstairs—could help.”

“Adelbert? Are you mad?”

“The other. He knows codes. It was by means of one we caught him. I have heard that all these things have one basis, and a simple one.”

The concierge considered. Then he rose. “It is worth trying,” he observed.

He thrust the letter into his pocket, and the two conspirators went out into the gloomy hall. There, on a ledge, lay the white tapers, and one he lighted, shielding it from the draft in the hollow of his great hand. Then he led the way to the top of the house.

Here were three rooms. One, the best, was Herman Spier’s, a poor thing at that. Next to it was old Adelbert’s. As they passed the door they could hear him within, muttering to himself. At the extreme end of the narrow corridor, in a passage almost blocked by old furniture, was another room, a sort of attic, with a slanting roof.

Making sure that old Adelbert did not hear them, they went back to this door, which the concierge unlocked. Inside the room was dark. The taper showed little. As their eyes became accustomed to the darkness, the outlines of the attic stood revealed, a junk-room, piled high with old trunks, and in one corner a bed.

Black Humbert, taper in hand, approached the bed. Herman remained near the door. Now, with the candle near, the bed revealed a man lying on it, and tied with knotted ropes; a young man, with sunken cheeks and weary, desperate eyes. Beside him, on a chair, were the fragments of a meal, a bit of broken bread, some cold soup, on which grease had formed a firm coating.

Lying there, sleeping and waking and sleeping again, young Haeckel, one time of His Majesty’s secret service and student in the University, had lost track of the days. He knew not how long he had been a prisoner, except that it had been eternities. Twice a day, morning and evening, came his jailer and loosened his bonds, brought food, of a sort, and allowed him, not out of mercy, but because it was the Committee’s pleasure that for a time he should live, to move about the room and bring the blood again to his numbed limbs.

He was to live because he knew many things which the Committee would know. But, as the concierge daily reminded him, there was a limit to mercy and to patience.

In the mean time they held him, a hostage against certain contingencies. Held him and kept him barely alive. Already he tottered about the room when his bonds were removed; but his eyes did not falter, or his courage. Those whom he had served so well, he felt, would not forget him. And meanwhile, knowing what he knew, he would die before he became the tool of these workers in the dark.

So he lay and thought, and slept when thinking became unbearable, and thus went his days and the long nights.

The concierge untied him, and stood back. “Now,” he said.

But the boy—he was no more—lay still. He made one effort to rise, and fell back.

“Up with you!” said the concierge, and jerked him to his feet. He caught the rail of the bed, or he would have fallen. “Now—stand like a man.”

He stood then, facing his captors without defiance. He had worn all that out in the first days of his imprisonment. He was in shirt and trousers only, his feet bare, his face unshaven—the thin first beard of early manhood.

“Well?” he said at last. “I thought—you’ve been here once to-night.”

“Right, my cuckoo. But to-night I do you double honor.”

But seeing that Haeckel was swaying, he turned to Herman Spier. “Go down,” he said, “and bring up some brandy. He can do nothing for us in this state.”

He drank the brandy eagerly when it came, and the concierge poured him a second quantity. What with weakness and slow starvation, it did what no threat of personal danger would have done. It broke down his resistance. Not immediately. He fought hard, when the matter was first broached to him. But in the end he took the letter and, holding it close to the candle, he examined it closely. His hands shook, his eyes burned. The two Terrorists watched him narrowly.

Brandy or no brandy, however, he had not lost his wits. He glanced up suddenly. “Tell me something about this,” he said. “And what will you do for me if I decode it?”

The concierge would promise anything, and did. Haeckel listened, and knew the offer of liberty was a lie. But there was something about the story of the letter itself that bore the hall-marks of truth.

“You see,” finished Black Humbert cunningly, “she—this—lady of the Court—is plotting with some one, or so we suspect. If it is only a liaison—!” He spread his hands. “If, as is possible, she betrays us to Karnia, that we should find out. It is not,” he added, “among our plans that Karnia should know too much of us.”

“Who is it?”

“I cannot betray a lady,” said Black Humbert, and leered.

The brandy was still working, but the spy’s mind was clear. He asked for a pencil, and set to work. After all, if there was a spy of Karl’s in the Palace, it were well to know it. He tried complicated methods first, to find that the body of the letter, after all, was simple enough. By reading every tenth word, he got a consistent message, save that certain supplies, over which the concierge had railed, were special code words for certain regiments. These he could not decipher.

“Whoever was to receive this,” he said at last, “would have been in possession of complete data of the army, equipment and all, and the location of various regiments. Probably you and your band of murderers have that already.”

The concierge nodded, no whit ruffled. “And for whom was it intended?”

“I cannot say. The address is fictitious, of course.”

Black Humbert scowled. “So!” he said. “You tell us only a part!”

“There is nothing else to tell. Save, as I have written here, the writer ends: ‘I must see you at once. Let me know where.’”

The brandy was getting in its work well by that time. He was feeling strong, his own man again, and reckless. But he was cunning, too. He yawned. “And in return for all this, what?” he demanded. “I have done you a service, friend cut-throat.”

The concierge stuffed letter and translation into his pocket. “What would you have, short of liberty?”

“Air, for one thing.” He stood up and stretched again. God, how strong he felt! “If you would open that accursed window for an hour—the place reeks.”

Humbert was in high good humor in spite of his protests. In his pocket he held the key to favor, aye, to a plan which he meant to lay before the Committee of Ten, a plan breath-taking in its audacity and yet potential of success. He went to the window and put his great shoulder against it.

Instantly Haeckel overturned the candle and, picking up the chair, hurled it at Herman Spier. He heard the clerk go down as he leaped for the door. Herman had not locked it. He was in the passage before the concierge had stumbled past the bed.

On the stairs his lightness counted. His bare feet made no sound. He could hear behind him the great mass of Humbert, hurling itself down. Haeckel ran as he had never run before. The last flight now, with the concierge well behind, and liberty two seconds away.

He flung himself against the doors to the street. But they were fastened by a chain, and the key was not in the lock.

He crumpled up in a heap as the concierge fell on him with fists like flails.

Some time later, old Adelbert heard a sound in the corridor, and peered out. Humbert, assisted by the lodger, Spier, was carrying to the attic what appeared to be an old mattress, rolled up and covered with rags. In the morning, outside the door, there was a darkish stain, however, which might have been blood.

At nine o’clock the next morning the Chancellor visited the Crown Prince. He came without ceremony. Lately he had been coming often. He liked to come in quietly, and sit for an hour in the schoolroom, saying nothing. Prince Ferdinand William Otto found these occasions rather trying.

“I should think,” he protested once to his governess, “that he would have something else to do. He’s the Chancellor, he?”

But on this occasion the Chancellor had an errand, the product of careful thought. Early as it was, already he had read his morning mail in his study, had dictated his replies, had eaten a frugal breakfast of fruit and sausage, and in the small inner room which had heard so many secrets, had listened to the reports of his agents, and of the King’s physicians. Neither had been reassuring.

The King had passed a bad night, and Haeckel was still missing. The Chancellor’s heart was heavy.

The Chancellor watched the Crown Prince, as he sat at the high desk, laboriously writing. It was the hour of English composition, and Prince Ferdinand William Otto was writing a theme.

“About dogs,” he explained. “I’ve seen a great many, you know. I could do it better with a pencil. My pen sticks in the paper.”

He wrote on, and Mettlich sat and watched. From the boy his gaze wandered over the room. He knew it well. Not so many years ago he had visited in this very room another bright-haired lad, whose pen had also stuck in the paper. The Chancellor looked up at the crossed swords, and something like a mist came into his keen old eyes.

He caught Miss Braithwaite’s glance, and he knew what was in her mind. For nine years now had come, once a year, the painful anniversary, of the death of the late Crown Prince and his young wife. For nine years had the city mourned, with flags at half-mast and the bronze statue of the old queen draped in black. And for nine years had the day of grief passed unnoticed by the lad on whom hung the destinies of the kingdom.

Now they confronted a new situation. The next day but one was the anniversary again. The boy was older, and observant. It would not be possible to conceal from him the significance of the procession marching through the streets with muffled drums. Even the previous year he had demanded the reason for crape on his grandmother’s statue, and had been put off, at the cost of Miss Braithwaite’s strong feeling for the truth. Also he had not been allowed to see the morning paper, which was, on these anniversaries, bordered with black. This had annoyed him. The Crown Prince always read the morning paper—especially the weather forecast.

They could not continue to lie to the boy. Truthfulness had been one of the rules of his rigorous upbringing. And he was now of an age to remember. So the Chancellor sat and waited, and, fingered, his heavy watch-chain.

Suddenly the Crown Prince looked up. “Have you ever been on a scenic railway?”, he inquired politely.

The Chancellor regretted that he had not.

“It’s very remarkable,” said Prince Ferdinand William Otto. “But unless you like excitement, perhaps you would not care for it.”

The Chancellor observed that he had had his share of excitement, in his, time, and was now for the ways of quiet.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto had a great many things to say, but thought better of it. Miss Braithwaite disliked Americans, for instance, and it was quite possible that the Chancellor did also. It seemed strange about Americans. Either one liked them a great deal, or not at all. He put his attention to the theme, and finished it. Then, flushed with authorship, he looked up. “May I read you the last line of it?” he demanded of the Chancellor.

“I shall be honored, Highness.” not often did the Chancellor say “Highness.” Generally he said “Otto” or “my child.”

Prince Ferdinand William Otto read aloud, with dancing eyes, his last line: “‘I should like to own a dog.’ I thought,” he said wistfully, “that I might ask my grandfather for one.”

“I see no reason why you should not have a dog,” the Chancellor observed.

“Not one to be kept at the stables,” Otto explained. “One to stay with me all the time. One to sleep on the foot of the bed.”

But here the Chancellor threw up his hands. Instantly he visualized all the objections to dogs, from fleas to rabies. And he put the difficulties into words. No mean speaker was the Chancellor when so minded. He was a master of style, of arrangement, of logic and reasoning. He spoke at length, even, at the end, rising and pacing a few steps up and down the room. But when he had concluded, when the dog, so to speak, had fled yelping to the country of dead hopes, Prince Ferdinand William Otto merely gulped, and said:

“Well, I wish I could have a dog!”

The Chancellor changed his tactics by changing the subject. “I was wondering this morning, as I crossed the park, if you would enjoy an excursion soon. Could it be managed, Miss Braithwaite?”

“I dare say,” said Miss Braithwaite dryly. “Although I must say, if there is no improvement in punctuation and capital letters—”

“What sort of excursion?” asked His Royal Highness, guardedly. He did not care for picture galleries.

“Out-of-doors, to see something interesting.”

But Prince Ferdinand William Otto was cautious with the caution of one who, by hoping little, may be agreeably disappointed. “A corner-stone, I suppose,” he said.

“Not a corner-stone,” said the Chancellor, with eyes that began to twinkle under ferocious brows. “No, Otto. A real excursion, up the river.”

“To the fort? I do want to see the new fort.”

As a matter of truth, the Chancellor had not thought of the fort. But like many another before him, he accepted the suggestion and made it his own. “To the fort, of course,” said he.

“And take luncheon along, and eat it there, and have Hedwig and Nikky? And see the guns?”

But this was going too fast. Nikky, of course, would go, and if the Princess cared to, she too. But luncheon! It was necessary to remind the Crown Prince that the officers at the fort would expect to have him join their mess. There was a short parley over this, and it was finally settled that the officers should serve luncheon, but that there should be no speeches. The Crown Prince had already learned that his presence was a sort of rod of Aaron, to unloose floods of speeches. Through what outpourings of oratory he had sat or stood, in his almost ten years!

“Then that’s settled,” he said at last. “I’m very happy. This morning I shall apologize to M. Puaux.”

During the remainder of the morning the Crown Prince made various excursions to the window to see if the weather was holding good. Also he asked, during his half-hour’s intermission, for the great box of lead soldiers that was locked away in the cabinet. “I shall pretend that the desk is a fort, Miss Braithwaite,” he said. “Do you mind being the enemy, and pretending to be shot now and then?”

But Miss Braithwaite was correcting papers. She was willing to be a passive enemy and be potted at, but she drew the line at falling over. Prince Ferdinand William Otto did not persist. He was far too polite. But he wished in all his soul that Nikky would come. Nikky, he felt, would die often and hard.

But Nikky did not come.

Came German and French, mathematics and music and no Nikky. Came at last the riding-hour—and still no Nikky.

At twelve o’clock, Prince Ferdinand William Otto, clad in his riding-garments of tweed knickers, puttees, and a belted jacket, stood by the schoolroom window and looked out. The inner windows of his suite faced the courtyard, but the schoolroom opened over the Place—a bad arrangement surely, seeing what distractions to lessons may take place in a public square, what pigeons feeding in the sun, what bands with drums and drum-majors, what children flying kites.

“I don’t understand it,” the Crown Prince said plaintively. “He is generally very punctual. Perhaps—”

But he loyally refused to finish the sentence. The “perhaps” was a grievous thought, nothing less than that Nikky and Hedwig were at that moment riding in the ring together, and had both forgotten him. He was rather used to being forgotten. With the exception of Miss Braithwaite, he was nobody’s business, really. His aunt forgot him frequently. On Wednesdays it was his privilege—or not; as you think of it—to take luncheon with the Archduchess; and once in so often she would forget and go out. Or be in, and not expecting him, which was as bad.

“Bless us, I forgot the child,” she would say on these occasions.

But until now, Nikky had never forgotten. He had been the soul of remembering, indeed, and rather more than punctual. Prince Ferdinand William Otto consulted his watch. It was of gold, and on the inside was engraved:

“To Ferdinand William Otto from his grandfather, on the occasion of his taking his first communion.”

“It’s getting rather late,” he observed.

Miss Braithwaite looked troubled. “No doubt something has detained him,” she said, with unusual gentleness. “You might work at the frame for your Cousin Hedwig. Then, if Captain Larisch comes, you can still have a part of your lesson.”

Prince Ferdinand William Otto brightened. The burntwood photograph frame for Hedwig was his delight. And yesterday, as a punishment for the escapade of the day before, it had been put away with an alarming air of finality. He had traced the design himself, from a Christmas card, and it had originally consisted of a ring and small Cupids, alternating with hearts. He liked it very much. The Cupids were engagingly fat. However, Miss Braithwaite had not approved of their state of nature, and it had been necessary to drape them with sashes tied in neat bows.

The pyrography outfit was produced, and for fifteen minutes Prince Ferdinand William Otto labored, his head on one side, his royal tongue slightly protruded. But, above the thin blue smoke of burning, his face remained wistful. He was afraid, terribly afraid, that he had been forgotten again.

“I hope Nikky is not ill,” he said once. “He smokes a great many cigarettes. He says he knows they are bad for him.”

“Certainly they are bad for him,” said Miss Braithwaite. “They contain nicotine, which is a violent poison. A drop of nicotine on the tongue of a dog will kill it.”

The reference was unfortunate.

“I wish I might have a dog,” observed Prince Ferdinand William Otto.

Fortunately, at that moment, Hedwig came in. She came in a trifle defiantly, although that passed unnoticed, and she also came unannounced, as was her cousinly privilege. And she stood inside the door and stared at the Prince. “Well!” she said.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto was equal to the occasion. He hastily drew out his pocket-handkerchief and spread it over the frame. But his face was rather red. A palace is a most difficult place to have a secret in.

“Well?” she repeated; with a rising inflection. It was clear that she had not noticed the handkerchief incident. “Is there to be no riding-lesson to-day?”

“I don’t know. Nikky has not come.”

“Where is he?”

Here the drop of nicotine got in its deadly work. “I’m afraid he is ill,” said Prince Ferdinand William Otto. “He said he smoked too many cigarettes, and—”

“Is Captain Larisch ill?” Hedwig looked at the governess, and lost some of her bright color.

Miss Braithwaite did not know, and said so. “At the very least,” she went on, “he should have sent some word. I do not know what things are coming to. Since His Majesty’s illness, no one seems to have any responsibility, or to take any.”

“But of course he would have sent word,” said Hedwig, frowning: “I don’t understand it. He has never been so late before, has he?”

“He has never been late at all,” Prince Ferdinand William Otto spoke up quickly.

After a time Hedwig went away, and the Crown Prince took off his riding-clothes. He ate a very small luncheon, swallowing mostly a glass of milk and a lump in his throat. And afterward he worked at the frame, for an hour, shading the hearts carefully. At three o’clock he went for his drive.

There were two variations to the daily drive: One day they went up the river—almost as far as the monastery; the next day they went through the park. There was always an excitement about the park drive, because the people who spied the gold-wheeled carriage always came as close as possible, to see if it was really the Crown Prince. And when, as sometimes happened, it was only Hedwig, or Hilda, and Ferdinand William Otto had been kept at home by a cold, they always looked disappointed.

This was the park day. The horses moved sedately. Beppo looked severe and haughty. A strange man, in the place of Hans, beside Beppo, watched the crowd with keen and vigilant eyes. On the box between them, under his hand, the new footman had placed a revolver. Beppo sat as far away from it as he dared. The crowd lined up, and smiled and cheered. And Prince Ferdinand William Otto sat very straight; and bowed right and left, smiling.

Old Adelbert, limping across the park to, the Opera, paused and looked. Then he shook his head. The country was indeed come to a strange pass, with only that boy and the feeble old King to stand between it and the things of which men whispered behind their hands. He went on, with his head down. A strange pass indeed, with revolution abroad in quiet places, and a cabal among the governors of the Opera to sell the opera-glass privilege to the highest bidder.

He went on, full of trouble.

Olga, the wardrobe woman, was also on her way to the Opera, which faced the park. She also saw the carriage, and at first her eyes twinkled. It was he, of course. The daring of him! But, as the carriage drew nearer, she bent forward. He looked pale, and there was a wistful droop to his mouth. “They have punished him for the little prank,” she muttered. “That tight-faced Englishwoman, of course. The English are a hard race.” She, too, went on.

As they drew near the end of the park, where the Land of Desire towered, Prince Ferdinand William Otto searched it with eager eyes. How wonderful it was! How steep and high, and alluring! He glanced sideways at Miss Braithwaite, but it was clear that to her it was only a monstrous heap of sheet-iron and steel, adorned with dejected greenery that had manifestly been out too soon in the chill air of very early spring.

A wonderful possibility presented itself. “If I see Bobby,” he asked, “may I stop the carriage and speak to him?”

“Certainly not.”

“Well, may I call to him?”

“Think it over,” suggested Miss Braithwaite. “Would your grandfather like to know that you had done anything so undignified?”

He turned to her a rather desperate pair of eyes. “But I could explain to him,” he said. “I was in such a hurry when I left, that I’m afraid I forgot to thank him. I ought to thank him, really. He was very polite to me.”

Miss Braithwaite sat still in her seat and said nothing. The novelty of riding in a royal carriage had long since passed away, but she was aware that her position was most unusual. Not often did a governess, even of good family, as she was, ride daily in the park with a crown prince. In a way, on these occasions, she was more royal than royalty. She had, now and then, an inclination to bow right and left herself. And she guarded the dignity of these occasions with a watchful eye. So she said nothing just then. But later on something occurred to her. “You must remember, Otto,” she said, “that this American child dislikes kings, and our sort of government.” Shades of Mr. Gladstone—our sort of government! “It is possible, isn’t it, that he would resent your being of the ruling family? Why not let things be as they are?”

“We were very friendly,” said Ferdinand William Otto in a small voice. “I don’t think it would make any difference.”

But the seed was sown in the fertile ground of his young mind, to bear quick fruit.

It was the Crown Prince who saw Bobby first.

He was standing on a bench, peering over the shoulders of the crowd. Prince Ferdinand William Otto saw him, and bent forward. “There he is!” he said, in a tense tone. “There on the—”

“Sit up straight,” commanded Miss Braithwaite.

“May I just wave once? I—”

“Otto!” said Miss Braithwaite, in a terrible voice.

But a dreadful thing was happening. Bobby was looking directly at him, and making no sign. His mouth was a trifle open, but that was all. Otto had a momentary glimpse of him, of the small cap set far back, of the white sweater, of two coolly critical eyes. Then the crowd closed up, and the carriage moved on.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto sat back in his seat, very pale. Clearly Bobby was through with him. First Nikky had forgotten him, and now the American boy had learned his unfortunate position as one of the detested order, and would have none of him.

“You see,” said Miss Braithwaite, with an air of relief, “he did not know you.”

Up on the box the man beside Beppo kept his hand on the revolver. The carriage turned back toward the Palace.

Late that afternoon the Chancellor had a visitor. Old Mathilde, his servant and housekeeper, showed some curiosity but little excitement over it. ‘She was, in fact, faintly resentful. The Chancellor had eaten little all day, and now, when she had an omelet ready to turn smoking out of the pan, must come the Princess Hedwig on foot like the common people, and demand to see him.

Mathilde admitted her, and surveyed her uncompromisingly. Royalties were quite as much in her line as they were in the Crown Prince’s.

“He is about to have supper, Highness.”

“Please, Mathilde,” begged Hedwig. “It is very important.”

Mathilde sighed. “As Your Highness wishes,” she agreed, and went grumblingly back to the study overlooking the walled garden.

“You may bring his supper when it is ready,” Hedwig called to her.

Mathilde was mollified, but she knew what was fitting, if the Princess did not. The omelet spoiled in the pan.

The Chancellor was in his old smoking-coat and slippers. He made an effort to don his tunic, but Hedwig, on Mathilde’s heels, caught him in the act. And, after a glance at her face, he relinquished the idea, bowed over her hand, and drew up a chair for her.

And that was how the Chancellor of the kingdom learned that Captain Larisch, aide-de-camp to His Royal Highness the Crown Prince, had disappeared.

“I am afraid it is serious,” she said, watching him with wide, terrified eyes. “I know more than you think I do. I—we hear things, even in the Palace.”

Irony here, but unconscious. “I know that there is trouble. And it is not like Captain Larisch to desert his post.”

“A boyish escapade, Highness,” said the Chancellor. But, in the twilight, he gripped hard at the arms of his chair. “He will turn up, very much ashamed of himself, to-night or to-morrow.”

“That is what you want to believe. You know better.”

He leaned back in his chair and considered her from under his heavy brows. So this was how things were; another, and an unlooked-for complication. Outside he could hear Mathilde’s heavy footstep as she waited impatiently for the Princess to go. The odor of a fresh omelet filled the little house. Nikky gone, perhaps to join the others who, one by one, had felt the steel of the Terrorists. And this girl, on whom so much hung, sitting there, a figure of young tragedy.

“Highness,” he said at last, “if the worst has happened,—and that I do not believe,—it will be because there is trouble, as you have said. Sooner or later, we who love our country must make sacrifices for it. Most of all, those in high places will be called upon. And among them you may be asked to help.”

“I? What can I do?” But she knew, and the Chancellor saw that she knew.

“It is Karl, then?”

“It may be King Karl, Hedwig.”

Hedwig rose, and the Chancellor got heavily to his feet. She was fighting for calmness, and she succeeded very well. After all, if Nikky were gone, what did it matter? Only— “There are so many of you,” she said, rather pitifully. “And you are all so powerful. And against you there is only—me.”

“Why against us, Highness?”

“Because,” said Hedwig, “because I care for some one else, and I shall care for him all the rest of my life, even if he never comes back. You may marry me to whom you please, but I shall go on caring. I shall never forget. And I shall make Karl the worst wife in the world, because I hate him.”

She opened the door and went out without ceremony, because she was hard-driven and on the edge of tears. In the corridor she almost ran over the irritated Mathilde, and she wept all the way back to the Palace, much to the dismay of her lady in waiting, who had disapproved of the excursion anyhow.

That night, the city was searched for Nikky Larisch, but without result.

Nikky Larisch had been having an exciting time. First of all, he exchanged garments with the chauffeur, and cursed his own long legs, which proved difficult to cover adequately. But the chauffeur’s long fur ulster helped considerably. The exchange was rather a ticklish matter, and would have been more so had he not found a revolver in the fur coat pocket. It is always hard to remove a coat from a man whose arms are tied, and trousers are even more difficult. To remove trousers from a refractory prisoner offers problems. They must be dragged off, and a good thrust from a heavy boot, or two boots, has been known to change the fate of nations.

However, Nikky’s luck stood. His prisoner kicked, but owing to Nikky’s wise precaution of having straddled him, nothing untoward happened.

Behold, then, Nikky of the brave heart standing over his prostrate prisoner, and rolling him, mummy fashion, in his own tunic and a rug from the machine.

“It is cold, my friend,” he said briefly; “but I am a kindly soul, and if you have told me the truth, you will not have so much as a snuffle to remind you of this to-morrow.”

“I have told the truth.”

“As a soldier, of course,” Nikky went on, “I think you have made a mistake. You should have chosen the precipice. But as a private gentleman, I thank you.”

Having examined the knots in the rope, which were very well done, indeed, and having gagged the chauffeur securely, Nikky prepared to go. In his goggles, with the low-visored cap and fur coat, he looked not unlike his late companion. But he had a jaunty step as he walked toward the car, a bit of swagger that covered, perhaps, just a trifle of uneasiness.

For Nikky now knew his destination, knew that he was bound on perilous work, and that the chances of his returning were about fifty-fifty, or rather less.

Nevertheless, he was apparently quite calm as he examined the car. He would have chosen, perhaps, a less perilous place to attempt its mysteries, but needs must. He climbed in, and released the brakes. Then, with great caution, and considerable noise, he worked it away from the brink of the chasm, and started off.

He did not know his way. Over the mountains it was plain enough, for there was but one road. After he descended into the plain of Karnia, however, it became difficult. Sign-posts were few and not explicit. But at last he found the railroad, which he knew well—that railroad without objective, save as it would serve to move troops toward the border. After that Nikky found it easier.

But, with his course assured, other difficulties presented themselves. To take the letter to those who would receive it was one thing. But to deliver it, with all that it might contain, was another. He was not brilliant, was Nikky. Only brave and simple of heart, and unversed in the ways of darkness.

If, now, he could open the letter and remove it, substituting—well, what could he substitute? There were cigarette papers in his pocket. Trust Nikky for that. But how to make the exchange?

Nikky pondered. To cut the side of the envelope presented itself. But it was not good enough. The best is none too good when one’s life is at stake.

The engine was boiling hard, a dull roaring under the hood that threatened trouble. He drew up beside the road and took off the water-cap. Then he whistled. Why, of course! Had it not been done from time immemorial, this steaming of letters? He examined it. It bore no incriminating seal.

He held the envelope over the water-cap, and was boyishly pleased to feel the flap loosen. After all, things were easy enough if one used one’s brains. He rather regretted using almost all of his cigarette papers, of course. He had, perhaps, never heard of the drop of nicotine on the tongue of a dog.

As for the letter itself, he put it, without even glancing at it, into his cap, under the lining. Then he sealed the envelope again and dried it against one of the lamps. It looked, he reflected, as good as new.

He was extremely pleased with himself.

Before he returned to the machine he consulted his watch. It was three o’clock. True, the long early spring night gave him four more hours of darkness. But the messenger was due at three, at the hunting-lodge in, the mountains which was his destination. He would be, at the best, late by an hour.

He pushed the car to its limit. The fine hard road, with its border of trees, stretched ahead. Nikky surveyed it with a soldier’s eye. A military road, or he knew nothing—one along which motor-lorries could make express time. A marvelous road, in that sparsely settled place. Then he entered the forest, that kingly reserve in which Karl ran deer for pastime.

He was nearing his destination.

On what the messenger had told him Nikky hung his hope of success. This was, briefly, that he should go to the royal shooting-box at Wedeling, and should go, not to the house itself, but to the gate-keeper’s lodge. Here he was to leave his machine, and tap at the door. On its being opened, he was to say nothing, but to give the letter to him who opened the door. After that he was to take the machine away to the capital, some sixty miles farther on.

The message, then, was to the King himself. For Nikky, as all the world, knew that Karl, with some kindred spirits, was at Wedeling, shooting. That is, if the messenger told the truth. Nikky intended to find out. He was nothing if not thorough.

Nikky had lost much of his jaunty air by that time. On the surface he was his usual debonair self; but his mouth was grim and rather contemptuous. This was Karl’s way: to propose marriage with a Princess of Livonia, and yet line the country with his spies! Let him but return, God willing, with his report, and after that, let them continue negotiations with Karl if they dared.

When at last the lights of the lodge at the gate of Wedeling gleamed out through the trees, it was half-pass three, and a wet spring snow was falling softly. In an open place Nikky looked up. The stars were gone.

The lodge now, and the gate-keeper’s house. Nikky’s heart hammered as he left the car—hammered with nervousness, not terror. But he went boldly to the door, and knocked.

So far all was well. There were footsteps within, and a man stepped out into the darkness, closing the door behind him. Nikky, who had come so far to see this very agent, and to take back a description of him, felt thwarted. Things were not being done, he felt, according to specification. And the man spoke, which was also unexpected.

“You have the letter?” he asked.

“It is here.” Luckily he did not speak the patois.

“I will take it.”

Nikky held it out. The man fumbled for it, took it.

“Orders have come,” said the voice, “that you remain here for the night. In the morning you are to carry dispatches to the city.”

Poor Nikky! With his car facing toward the lodge, and under necessity, in order to escape, to back it out into the highway! He thought quickly. There was no chance of overpowering his man quickly and silently. And the house was not empty. From beyond the door came the sounds of men’s voices, and the thud of drinking-mugs on a bare table.

“You will take me up to the house, and then put the car away until morning.”

Nikky breathed again. It was going to be easy, after all. If only the road went straight to the shooting-box itself, the rest was simple. But he prayed that he make no false turning, to betray his ignorance.

“Very well,”—he said.

His companion opened the door behind him. “Ready, now,” he called. “The car is here.”

Two men rose from a table where they had been sitting, and put on greatcoats of fur. The lamplight within quivered in the wind from the open door. Nikky was quite calm now. His heart beat its regular seventy-two, and he even reflected, with a sort of grim humor, that the Chancellor would find the recital of this escapade much to his taste. In a modest way Nikky felt that he was making history.

The man who had received the letter got into the machine beside him. The other two climbed into the tonneau. And, as if to make the denouement doubly ridiculous, the road led straight. Nikky, growing extremely cheerful behind his goggles, wondered how much petrol remained in the car.

The men behind talked in low tones. Of the shooting, mostly, and the effect of the snow on it. They had been after pheasants that day, it appeared.

“They are late to-night,” grumbled one of them, as the house appeared, full lighted. “A tardy start to-morrow again!”

“The King must have his sleep,” commented the other, rather mockingly.

With a masterly sweep, Nikky drew up his machine before the entrance. Let them once alight, let him but start his car down the road again, and all the devils of the night might follow. He feared nothing.

But here again Nikky planned too fast. The servant who came out to open the doors of the motor had brought a message. “His Majesty desires that the messenger come in,” was the bomb-shell which exploded in Nikky’s ears.

Nikky hesitated. And then some imp of recklessness in him prompted him not to run away, but to see the thing through. It was, after all, a chance either way. These men beside the car were doubtless armed—one at least, nearest him, was certainly one of Karl’s own secret agents. And, as Nikky paused, he was not certain, but it seemed to him that the man took, a step toward him.

“Very well,” said Nikky, grumbling. “But I have had a long ride, and a cold one. I need sleep.”

Even then he had a faint hope that the others would precede him, and that it would be possible to leap back to the car, and escape. But, whether by accident or design, the group closed about him. Flight was out of the question.

A little high was Nikky’s head as he went in. He had done a stupid thing now, and he knew it. He should have taken his letter and gone back with it. But, fool or not, he was a soldier. Danger made him calm.

So he kept his eyes open. The shooting-box was a simple one, built, after the fashion of the mountains, of logs, and wood-lined. The walls of the hall were hung with skins and the mounted heads of animals, boar and deer, and even an American mountain sheep, testifying to the range of its royal owner’s activities as a hunter. Great pelts lay on the floor, and the candelabra were horns cunningly arranged to hold candles. The hall extended to the roof, and a gallery half-way up showed the doors of the sleeping-apartments.

The lodge was noisy. Loud talking, the coming and going of servants with trays, the crackle of wood fires in which whole logs were burning, and, as Nikky and his escort entered, the roaring chorus of a hunting-song filled the ears.

Two of the men flung off their heavy coats, and proceeded without ceremony into the room whence the sounds issued. The third, however, still holding the letter, ushered Nikky into a small side room, a sort of study, since it contained a desk. For kings must pursue their clerical occupations even on holiday. A plain little room it was, containing an American typewriter, and beside the desk only a chair or two upholstered in red morocco.

Nikky had reluctantly removed his cap. His goggles, however, he ventured to retain. He was conscious that his guide was studying him intently. But not with suspicion, he thought: Rather as one who would gauge the caliber of the man before him. He seemed satisfied, too, for his voice, which had been curt, grew more friendly.

“You had no trouble?” he asked.

“None, sir.”

“Did Niburg say anything?”

Niburg, then, was the spy of the cathedral. Nikky reflected. Suddenly he saw a way out. It was, he afterward proclaimed, not his own thought. It came to him like a message. He burned a candle to his patron saint, sometime later, for it.

“The man Niburg had had an unfortunate experience, sir. He reported that, during an evening stroll, before he met me, he was attacked by three men, with the evident intention of securing the letter. He was badly beaten up.”

His companion started. “Niburg,” he said. “Then—” He glanced at the letter he held. “We must find some one else,” he muttered. “I never trusted the fellow. A clerk, nothing else. For this work it takes wit.”

Nikky, sweating with strain; felt that it did, indeed. “He was badly used up, sir,” he offered. “Could hardly walk, and was still trembling with excitement when I met him.”

The man reflected. A serious matter, he felt. Not so serious as it might have been, since he held the letter. But it showed many things, and threatened others. He touched a bell. “Tell his, Majesty,” he said to the servant who appeared, “that his messenger is here.”

The servant bowed and withdrew.

Nikky found the wait that followed trying. He thought of Hedwig, and of the little Crown Prince. Suddenly he knew that he had had, no right to attempt this thing. He had given his word, almost, his oath, to the King, to protect and watch over the boy. And here he was, knowing now that mischief was afoot, and powerless. He cursed himself for his folly.

Then Karl came in. He came alone, closing the door behind him. Nikky and his companion bowed, and Nikky surveyed him through his goggles. The same mocking face he remembered, from Karl’s visit to the summer palace, the same easy, graceful carriage, the same small mustache. He was in evening dress, and the bosom of his shirt was slightly rumpled. He had been drinking, but he was not intoxicated. He was slightly flushed, his eyes were abnormally bright. He looked, for the moment; rather amiable. Nikky was to learn, later on, how easily his smile hardened to a terrifying grin. The long, rather delicate nose of his family, fine hair growing a trifle thin, and a thin, straight body this was Karl, King of Karnia, and long-time enemy to Nikky’s own land.

He ignored Nikky’s companion. “You brought a letter?”

Nikky bowed, and the other man held it out. Karl took it.

“The trip was uneventful?”

“Yes, sire.”

“A bad night for it,” Karl observed, and glanced at the letter in his hand. “Was there any difficulty at the frontier?”

“None, sire.”

Karl tore the end off the envelope. “You will remain here to-night,” he said. “To-morrow morning I shall send dispatches to the city. I hope you have petrol. These fellows here—” He did not complete the sentence. He inserted two royal fingers into the envelope and drew out—Nikky’s cigarette papers!

For a moment there was complete silence in the room. Karl turned the papers over.

It was then that his face hardened into a horrible grin. He looked up, raising his head slowly.

“What is this?” he demanded, very quietly.

“The letter, sire,” said Nikky.

“The letter! Do you call these a letter?”

Nikky drew himself up. “I have brought the envelope which was given me.”

Without a word Karl held out papers and envelope to the other man, who took them. Then he turned to Nikky, and now he raised his voice. “Where did you get this—hoax?” he demanded.

“At the cathedral, from the man Niburg.”

“You lie!” said Karl. Then, for a moment, he left Nikky and turned on his companion in a fury. He let his royal rage beat on that unlucky individual while the agent stood, white and still. Not until it was over, and Karl, spent with passion, was pacing the floor, did Nikky venture a word.

“If this is not what Your Majesty expected,” he said, “there is perhaps an explanation.”

Karl wheeled on him. “Explanation!”

“The man Niburg was attacked, early last evening, by three men. They beat him badly, and attempted to rob him. His story to me, sire. He believed that they were after the letter, but that he had preserved it. It is, of course, a possibility that, while he lay stunned, they substituted another envelope for the one he carried.”

Karl tore the envelope from the agent’s hands and inspected it carefully. Evidently, as with the agent, the story started a new train of thought. Nikky drew a long breath. After all, there was still hope that the early morning shooting would have another target than himself.

Karl sat down, and his face relaxed. It was stern, but no longer horrible. “Tell me this Niburg’s story,” he commanded.

“He was walking through the old city,” Nikky commenced, “when three men fell on him. One, a large one, knocked him insensible and then went through his pockets. The others—”

“Strange!” said Karl. “If he was insensible, how does he know all this?”

“It was his story, sire,” Nikky explained. But he colored. “A companion, who was with him, ran away.”

“This companion,” Karl queried. “A dark, heavy fellow, was it?”

“No. Rather a pale man, blond. A—” Nikky checked himself.

But Karl was all suavity. “So,” he said, “while Niburg was unconscious the large man took the letter, which was sealed, magically opened it, extracted its contents, replaced them with—this, and then sealed it again!”

The King turned without haste to a drawer in his desk, and opened it. He was smiling. When he faced about again, Nikky saw that he held a revolver in =his hand. Save that the agent had taken a step forward, nothing in the room had changed. And yet; for Nikky everything had changed.

Nikky had been a reckless fool, but he was brave enough. He smiled, a better smile than Karl’s twisted one.

“I have a fancy,” said King Karl, “to manage this matter for myself. Keep back, Kaiser. Now, my friend, you will give me the packet of cigarette papers you carry.”

Resistance would do no good. Nikky brought them out, and Karl’s twisted smile grew broader as he compared them with the ones the envelope had contained.

“You see,” he said, “you show the hand of the novice. You should have thrown these away. But, of course, all your methods are wrong. Why, for instance, have you come here at all? You have my man—but that I shall take up later. We will first have the letter.”

But here Nikky stood firm. Let them find the letter. He would not help them. But again he cursed himself. There had been a thousand hiding-places along the road—but he must bring the incriminating thing with him, and thus condemn himself!

Now commenced a curious scene, curious because one of the actors was Karl of Karnia himself. He seemed curiously loath to bring in assistance, did Karl. Or perhaps the novelty of the affair appealed to him. And Nikky’s resistance to search, with that revolver so close, was short-lived.

Even while he was struggling, Nikky was thinking. Let them get the letter, if they must. Things would at least be no worse than before. But he resolved that no violence would tear from him the place where the messenger was hidden. Until they had got that, he had a chance for life.

They searched his cap last. Nikky, panting after that strange struggle, saw Kaiser take it from the lining of his cap, and pass it to the King.

Karl took it. The smile was gone now, and something ugly and terrible had taken its place. But that, too, faded as he looked at the letter.

It was a blank piece of note-paper.

With the approach of the anniversary of his son’s death, the King grew increasingly restless. Each year he determined to put away this old grief, and each year, as his bodily weakness increased, he found it harder to do so. In vain he filled his weary days with the routine of his kingdom. In vain he told himself that there were worse things than to be cut off in one’s prime, that the tragedy of old age is a long tragedy, with but one end. To have out-lived all that one loves, he felt, was worse by far. To have driven, in one gloomy procession after another, to the old Capuchin church and there to have left, prayerfully, some dearly beloved body—that had been his life. His son had escaped that. But it was poor comfort to him.

On other years he had had the Crown Prince with him as much as possible on this dreary day of days. But the Crown Prince was exiled, in disgrace. Not even for the comfort of his small presence could stern discipline be relaxed.

Annunciata was not much comfort to him. They had always differed, more or less, the truth being, perhaps, that she was too much like the King ever to sympathize fully with him. Both were arrogant, determined, obstinate. And those qualities, which age was beginning to soften in the King, were now, in Annunciata, in full strength and blooming.

But there was more than fundamental similarity at fault. Against her father the Archduchess held her unhappy marriage.

“You did this,” she had said once, when an unusually flagrant escapade had come to the ears of the Palace. “You did it. I told you I hated him. I told you what he was, too. But you had some plan in mind. The plan never materialized, but the marriage did. And here I am.” She had turned on him then, not angrily, but with cold hostility. “I shall never forgive you for it,” she said.

She never had. She made her daily visit to her father, and, as he grew more feeble, she was moved now and then to pity for him. But it was pity, nothing more. The very hands with which she sometimes changed his pillows were coldly efficient. She had not kissed him in years.

And now, secretly willing that Hedwig should marry Karl, she was ready to annoy him by objecting to it.

On the day after her conversation with General Mettlich, she visited the King. It was afternoon. The King had spent the morning in his study, propped with pillows as was always the case now, working with a secretary. The secretary was gone when she entered, and he sat alone. Over his knees was spread one of the brilliant rugs that the peasants wove in winter evenings, when the snow beat about their small houses and the cattle were snug in barns. Above it his thin old face looked pinched and pale.

He had passed a trying day. Once having broken down the Chancellor’s barrier of silence, the King had insisted on full knowledge; with the result that he had sat, aghast, amid the ruins of his former complacency. The country and the smaller cities were comparatively quiet, so far as demonstrations against the Government were concerned. But unquestionably they plotted. As for the capital, it was a seething riot of sedition, from the reports. A copy of a newspaper, secretly printed and more secretly circulated, had brought fire to the King’s eyes. It lay on his knees as his daughter entered.

Annunciata touched her lips to his hand. Absorbed as he was in other matters, it struck him, as she bent, that Annunciata was no longer young, and that Time w as touching her with an unloving finger. He viewed her graying hair, her ugly clothes, with the detached eye of age. And he sighed.

“Well, father,” she said, looking down at him, “how do you feel?”

“Sit down,” he said. The question as to his health was too perfunctory to require reply. Besides, he anticipated trouble, and it was an age-long habit of his to meet it halfway.

Annunciata sat, with a jingling of chains. She chose a straight chair, and faced him, very erect.

“How old is Hedwig?” demanded the King

“Nineteen.”

“And Hilda?”

“Sixteen.”

He knew their ages quite well. It was merely the bugle before the attack.

“Hedwig is old enough to marry. Her grandmother was not nineteen when I married her.”

“It would be better,” said Annunciata, “to marry her while she is young, before she knows any better.”

“Any better than what?” inquired the King testily.

“Any better than to marry at all.”

The King eyed her. She was not, then, even attempting to hide her claws. But he was an old bird, and not to be caught in an argumentative cage.

“There are several possibilities for Hedwig,” he said. “I have gone into the matter pretty thoroughly. As you know, I have had this on my mind for some time. It is necessary to arrange things before I—go.”

The King, of course, was neither asking nor expecting sympathy from her, but mentally, and somewhat grimly, he compared her unmoved face with that of his old friend and Chancellor, only a few nights before.

“It is a regrettable fact,” he went on, “that I must leave, as I shall, a sadly troubled country. But for that—” he paused. But for that, he meant, he would go gladly. He needed rest. His spirit, still so alive, chafed daily more and more against its worn body. He believed in another life, did the old King. He wanted the hearty handclasp of his boy again. Even the wife who had married him against her will had grown close to him in later years. He needed her too. A little rest, then, and after that a new life, with those who had gone ahead.

“A sadly troubled country,” he repeated.

“All countries are troubled. We are no worse than others.”

“Perhaps not. But things are changing. The old order is changing. The spirit of unrest—I shall not live to see it. You may, Annunciata. But the day is coming when all thrones will totter. Like this one.”

Now at last he had pierced her armor. “Like this one!”

“That is what I said. Rouse yourself, Annunciata. Leave that little boudoir of yours, with its accursed clocks and its heat and its flub-dubbery, and see what is about you! Discontent! Revolution! We are hardly safe from day to day. Do you think that what happened nine years ago was a flash that died as it came? Nonsense. Read this!”

He held out the paper and she put on her pince-nez and read its headings, a trifle disdainfully. But the next moment she rose, and stood in front of him, almost as pale as he was. “You allow this sort of thing to be published?”

“No. But it is published.”

“And they dare to say things like this? Why, it—it is—”

“Exactly. It is, undoubtedly.” He was very calm. “I would not have troubled you with it. But the situation is bad. We are rather helpless.”

“Not—the army too?”

“What can we tell? These things spread like fires. Nothing may happen for years. On the other hand, tomorrow—!”

The Archduchess was terrified. She had known that there was disaffection about. She knew that in the last few years precautions at the Palace had been increased. Sentries were doubled. Men in the uniforms of lackeys, but doing no labor, were everywhere. But with time and safety she had felt secure.

“Of course,” the King resumed, “things are not as bad as that paper indicates. It is the voice of the few, rather than the many. Still, it is a voice.”

Annunciata looked more than her age now. She glanced around the room as though, already, she heard the mob at the doors.

“It is not safe to stay here, is it?” she asked. “We could go to the summer palace. That, at least, is isolated.”

“Too isolated,” said the King dryly. “And flight! The very spark, perhaps, to start a blaze. Besides,” he remind her, “I could not make the journey. If you would like to go, however, probably it can be arranged.”

But Annunciata was not minded to go without the Court. And she reflected, not unwisely, that if things were really as bad as they appeared, to isolate herself, helpless in the mountains, would be but to play into the enemy’s hand.

“To return to the matter of Hedwig’s marriage,” said the King. “I—”

“Marriage! When our very lives are threatened!”

“I would be greatly honored,” said the King, “if I might be permitted to finish what I was saying.”

She had the grace to flush.

“Under the circumstances,” the King resumed, “Hedwig’s marriage takes on great significance—great political significance.”

For a half-hour then, he talked to her. More than for years, he unbosomed himself. He had tried. His ministers had tried. Taxes had been lightened; the representation of the people increased, until; as he said, he was only nominally a ruler. But discontent remained. Some who had gone to America and returned with savings enough to set themselves up in business, had brought back with them the American idea.

He spoke without bitterness. They refused to allow for the difference between a new country and an old land, tilled for many generations. They forgot their struggles across the sea and brought back only stories of prosperity. Emigration had increased, and those who remained whispered of a new order, where each man was the government, and no man a king.

Annunciata listened to the end. She felt no pity for those who would better themselves by discontent and its product, revolt. She felt only resentment that her peace was being threatened, her position assailed. And in her resentment she included the King himself. He should have done better. These things, taken early enough, could have been arranged.

And something of this she did not hesitate to say. “Karnia is quiet enough,” she finished, a final thrust.

“Karnia is better off. A lowland, most of it, and fertile.” But a spot of color showed in his old cheeks. “I am glad you spoke of Karnia. Whatever plans we make, Karnia must be considered.”

“Why? Karnia does not consider us.”

He raised his hand. “You are wrong. Just now, Karnia is doing us the honor of asking an alliance with us. A matrimonial alliance.”

The Archduchess was hardly surprised, as one may believe. But she was not minded to yield too easily. The old resentment against her father flamed. Indifferent mother though she was, she made capital of a fear for Hedwig’s happiness. In a cold and quiet voice she reminded him of her own wretchedness, and of Karl’s reputation.

At last she succeeded in irritating the King—a more difficult thing now than in earlier times, but not so hard a matter at that. He listened quietly until she had finished, and then sent her away. When she had got part way to the door, however, he called her back. And since a king is a king, even if he is one’s father and very old, she came.

“Just one word more,” he said, in his thin, old, highbred voice. “Much of your unhappiness was of your own making. You, and you only, know how much. But nothing that you have said can change the situation. I am merely compelled to make the decision alone, and soon. I have not much time.”

So, after all, was the matter of the Duchess Hedwig’s marriage arranged, a composite outgrowth of expediency and obstinacy, of defiance and anger. And so was it hastened.

Irritation gave the King strength. That afternoon were summoned in haste the members of his Council: fat old Friese, young Marschall with the rat face, austere Bayerl with the white skin and burning eyes, and others. And to them all the King disclosed his royal will. There was some demur. Friese, who sweated with displeasure, ranted about old enemies and broken pledges. But, after all, the King’s will was dominant. Friese could but voice his protest and relapse into greasy silence.

The Chancellor sat silent during the conclave, silent, but intent. On each speaker he turned his eyes, and waited until at last Karl’s proposal, with its promises, was laid before them in full. Then, and only then, the Chancellor rose. His speech was short. He told them of what they all knew, their own insecurity. He spoke but a word of the Crown Prince, but that softly. And he drew for them a pictures of the future that set their hearts to glowing—a throne secure, a greater kingdom, freedom from the cost of war, a harbor by the sea.

And if, as he spoke, he saw not the rat eyes of Marschall, the greedy ones of some of the others, but instead a girl’s wide and pleading ones, he resolutely went on. Life was a sacrifice. Youth would pass, and love with it, but the country must survive.

The battle, which was no battle at all, was won. He had won. The country had won. The Crown Prince had won. Only Hedwig had lost. And only Mettlich knew just how she had lost.

When the Council, bowing deep, had gone away, the Chancellor remained standing by a window. He was feeling old and very tired. All that day, until the Council met with the King, he had sat in the little office on a back street, which was the headquarters of the secret service. All that day men had come and gone, bringing false clues which led nowhere. The earth had swallowed up Nikky Larisch.

“I hope you are satisfied,” said the King grimly, from behind him. “It was your arrangement.”

“It was my hope, sire,” replied the Chancellor dryly.

The necessity for work brought the King the strength to do it. Mettlich remained with him. Boxes were brought from vaults, unlocked and examined. Secretaries came and went. At eight o’clock a frugal dinner was spread in the study, and they ate it almost literally over state documents.

On and on, until midnight or thereabouts. Then they stopped. The thing was arranged. Nothing was left now but to carry the word to Karl.

Two things were necessary: Haste. The King, having determined it, would lose no time. And dignity. The granddaughter of the King must be offered with ceremony. No ordinary King’s messenger, then, but some dignitary of the Court.

To this emergency Mettlich rose like the doughty old warrior and statesman that he was. “If you are willing, sire,” he said, as he rose, “I will go myself.”

“When?”

“Since it must be done, the sooner the better. To-night, sire.”

The King smiled. “You were always impatient!” he commented. But he looked almost wistfully at the sturdy and competent old figure before him. Thus was he, not so long ago. Cold nights and spring storms had had no terrors for him. And something else he felt, although he said nothing—the stress of a situation which would send his Chancellor out at midnight, into a driving storm, to secure Karl’s support. Things must be bad indeed!

“To the capital?” he asked.

“Not so far. Karl is hunting. He is at Wedeling.” He went almost immediately, and the King summoned his valets, and was got to bed. But long after the automobile containing Mettlich and two secret agents was on the road toward the mountains, he tossed on his narrow bed. To what straits had they come indeed! He closed his eyes wearily. Something had gone out of his life. He did not realize at first what it was. When he did, he smiled his old grim smile in the darkness.

He had lost a foe. More than anything perhaps, he had dearly loved a foe.

The low gray car which carried the Chancellor was on its way through the mountains. It moved deliberately, for two reasons. First, the Chancellor was afraid of motors. He had a horseman’s hatred and fear of machines. Second, he was not of a mind to rouse King Karl from a night’s sleep, even to bring the hand of the Princess Hedwig. His intention was to put up at some inn in a village not far from the lodge and to reach Karl by messenger early in the morning, before the hunters left for the day.

Then, all being prepared duly and in order, Mettlich himself would arrive, and things would go forward with dignity and dispatch.

In the mean time he sat back among his furs and thought of many things. He had won a victory which was, after all, but a compromise. He had chosen the safe way, but it led over the body of a young girl, and he loathed it. Also, he thought of Nikky, and what might be. But the car was closed and comfortable. The motion soothed him. After a time he dropped asleep.

The valley of the Ar deepened. The cliff rose above them, a wall broken here and there by the offtake of narrow ravines, filled with forest trees. There was a pause while the chains on the rear wheels were supplemented by others in front, for there must be no danger of a skid. And another pause, where the road slanted perilously toward the brink of the chasm, and caution dictated that the Chancellor alight, and make a hundred feet or so of dangerous curve afoot.

It required diplomacy to get him out. But it was finally done, and his heavy figure, draped in its military cape, went on ahead, outlined by the lamps of the car behind him. The snow was hardly more than a coating, but wet and slippery. Mettlich stalked on, as one who would defy the elements, or anything else, to hinder him that night.

He was well around the curve, and the cliff was broken by a wedge of timber, when a curiously shaped object projected itself over the edge of the bank, and rolling down, lay almost at his feet. The lamps brought it into sharp relief—a man, gagged and tied, and rolled, cigar shaped, in an automobile robe.

The Chancellor turned, and called to his men. Then he bent over the bundle. The others ran up, and cut the bonds. What with cold and long inaction, and his recent drop over the bank, the man could not speak. One of the secret-service men had a flask, and held it to his lips. An amazing situation, indeed, increased by the discovery that under the robe he wore only his undergarments, with a soldier’s tunic wrapped around his shoulders. They carried him into the car, where he lay with head lolling back, and his swollen tongue protruding. Half dead he was, with cold and long anxiety. The brandy cleared his mind long before he could speak, and he saw by the uniforms that he was in the hands of the enemy. He turned sulkily silent then, convinced that he had escaped one death but to meet another. Twenty-four hours now he had faced eternity, and he was ready.

He preferred, however, to die fully clothed, and when, in response to his pointing up the bank and to his inarticulate mouthings, one of the secret police examined the bit of woodland with his pocket flash, he found a pair of trousers where Nikky had left them, neatly folded and hung over the branch of a tree. The brandy being supplemented by hot coffee from a patent bottle, the man revived further, made an effort, and sat up. His tongue was still swollen, but they made out what he said. He had been there since the night before. People had passed, a few peasants, a man with a cart, but he could not cry out, and he had hesitated to risk the plunge to the road. But at last he had made it. He was of Karnia, and a King’s messenger.

“I was coming back from the barrier,” he said thickly, “where I had carried dispatches to the officer in charge. On my return a man hailed me from the side of, the road, near where you found me. I thought that he desired to be taken on, and stopped my car. But he attacked me. He was armed and I was not. He knocked me senseless, and when I awakened I was above the road, among trees. I gave myself up when the snow commenced. Few pass this way. But I heard your car coming and made a desperate effort.”

“Then,” asked one of the agents, “these are not your clothes?”

“They are his; sir.”

The agent produced a flash-light and inspected the garments. Before the Chancellor’s eyes, button by button, strap on the sleeve, star on the cuff, came into view the uniform of a captain of his own regiment, the Grenadiers. Then one of his own men had done this infamous thing, one of his own officers, indeed.

“Go through the pockets,” he continued sternly.

Came, into view under the flash a pair of gloves, a box of matches, a silk handkerchief, a card-case. The agent said nothing, but passed a card to the Chancellor, who read it without comment.

There was silence in the car.

At last the Chancellor stirred. “This man—he took your car on?”

“Yes. And he has not returned. No other machine has passed.”

The secret-service men exchanged glances. There was more to this than appeared. Somewhere ahead, then, was Nikky Larisch, with a motor that did got belong to him, and wearing clothing which his victim described as a chauffeur’s coat of leather, breeches and puttees, and a fur greatcoat over all.

“Had the snow commenced when this happened?”

“Not then; sir. Shortly after.”

“Go out with the driver,” the Chancellor ordered one of his men, “and watch the road for the tracks of another car. Go slowly.”

So it was that, after an hour or so, they picked up Nikky’s trail, now twenty-four hours old but still clear, and followed it. The Chancellor was awake enough by this time, and bending forward. The man they had rescued slept heavily. As the road descended into the foothills, there were other tracks in the thin snow, and more than once they roused Nikky’s victim to pick out his own tire marks. He obeyed dully. When at last the trail turned from the highway toward the shooting-box at Wedeling, Mettlich fell back with something between a curse and a groan.

“The fool!” he muttered. “The young fool! It was madness.”

At last they drew up at an inn in the village on the royal preserve, and the Chancellor, looking rather gray, alighted. He directed that the man they had rescued be brought in. The Chancellor was not for losing him just yet. He took a room for him at the inn, and rather cavalierly locked him in it.

The dull-eyed landlord, yawning as he lighted the party upstairs with candles, apparently neither noticed nor cared that the three of them surrounded a fourth, and that the fourth looked both sullen and ill.

The car, with one of the secret-service men, Mettlich sent on to follow Nikky’s trail, and to report it to him. The other man was assigned to custody of the chauffeur. The Chancellor, more relieved than he would have acknowledged, reflected before a fire and over a glass of hot milk that he was rather unpropitiously bringing Karl a bride!

It was almost four in the morning when the police agent returned. The track he had followed apparently led into the grounds of Wedeling, but was there lost in many others. It did not, so far as he could discover, lead beyond the lodge gates.

The Chancellor sipped his hot milk and considered. Nikky Larisch a prisoner in Karl’s hands caused him less anxiety than it would have a month before. But what was behind it all?

The inn, grumbling at its broken rest, settled down to sleep again. The two secret-service agents took turns on chairs outside their prisoner’s door, glancing in occasionally to see that he still slept in his built-in bed.

At a little before five the man outside the prisoner’s door heard something inside the room. He glanced in. All was quiet. The prisoner slept heavily, genuine sleep. There was no mistaking it, the sleep of a man warm after long cold and exhaustion, weary after violent effort. The agent went out again, and locked the door behind him.

And as the door closed, a trap-door from the kitchen below opened softly under the sleeping man’s bed. With great caution came the landlord, head first, then shoulders. The space was cramped. He crawled up, like a snake out of a hole, and ducked behind the curtains of the bed. All was still quiet, save that the man outside struck a match and lighted a pipe.

Half an hour later, the Chancellor’s prisoner, still stiff and weak, was making his way toward the hunting-lodge.

Kaiser saw him first, and found the story unenlightening. Nor could Karl, roused by a terrified valet, make much more of it. When the man had gone, Karl lay back among his pillows and eyed his agent.

“So Mettlich is here!” he said. “A hasty journey. They must be eager.”

“They must be in trouble,” Kaiser observed dryly. And on that uncomplimentary comment King Karl slept, his face drawn into a wry smile.

But he received the Chancellor of Livonia cordially the next morning, going himself to the lodge doorstep to meet his visitor, and there shaking hands with him.

“I am greatly honored, Excellency,” he said, with his twisted smile.

“And I, sire.”

But the Chancellor watched him from under his shaggy brows. The messenger had escaped. By now Karl knew the story, knew of his midnight ride over the mountains; and the haste it indicated. He sheathed himself in dignity; did the Chancellor, held his head high and moved ponderously, as became one who came to talk of important matters, but not to ask a boon.

Karl himself led the way to his study, ignoring the chamberlain, and stood aside to let Mettlich enter. Then he followed and closed the door.

“It is a long time since you have honored Karnia with a visit,” Karl observed. “Will you sit down?”

Karl himself did not sit. He stood negligently beside the mantel, an arm stretched along it.

“Not since the battle of the Ar, sire,” replied the Chancellor dryly. He had headed an army of invasion then.

Karl smiled. “I hope that now your errand is more peaceful.”

For answer the Chancellor opened a portfolio he carried, and fumbled among its papers. But, having found the right one, he held it without opening it. “Before we come to that, sire, you have here, I believe, detained for some strange reason, a Captain Larisch, aide-de-camp”—he paused for effect—“to His Royal Highness, the Crown Prince of Livonia.”

Karl glanced up quickly. “Perhaps, if you will describe this—gentleman—”

“Nonsense,” said the Chancellor testily, “you have him. We have traced him here. Although by what authority you hold him I fail to understand. I am here to find out what you have done with him.” The paper trembled in the old man’s hand. He knew very well Karl’s quick anger, and he feared for Nikky feared horribly.

“Done with him?” echoed Karl. “If as Captain Larisch you refer to a madman who the night before last—”

“I do, sire. Madman is the word.”

Of course, it is not etiquette to interrupt a king. But kings were no novelty to the Chancellor. And quite often, for reasons of state, he had found interruptions necessary.

“He is a prisoner,” Karl said, in a new tone, stern enough now. “He assaulted and robbed one of my men. He stole certain documents. That he has not suffered for it already was because—well, because I believed that the unfortunate distrust between your country and mine, Excellency, was about to end.”

A threat that, undoubtedly. Let the arrangement between Karnia and Livonia be made, with Hedwig to seal the bargain, and Nikky was safe enough. But let Livonia demand too much, or not agree at all, and Nikky was lost. Thus did Nikky Larisch play his small part in the game of nations.

“Suppose,” said Karl unctuously, “that we discuss first another more important matter. I confess to a certain impatience.” He bowed slightly.

The Chancellor hesitated. Then he glanced thoughtfully at the paper in his hand.

Through a long luncheon, the two alone and even the servants dismissed, through a longer afternoon, negotiations went on. Mettlich fought hard on some points, only to meet defeat. Karl stood firm. The great fortresses on the border must hereafter contain only nominal garrisons. For the seaport strip he had almost doubled his price. The railroad must be completed within two years.

“Since I made my tentative proposal,” Karl said, “certain things have come to my ears which must be considered. A certain amount of unrest we all have. It is a part of the times we live in. But strange stories have reached us here, that your revolutionary party is again active, and threatening. This proposal was made to avoid wars, not to marry them. And civil war—” He shrugged his shoulders.

“You have said yourself, sire, that we all have a certain discontent.”

“The Princess Hedwig,” Karl said suddenly. “She has been told, of course?”

“Not officially. She knows, however.”

“How does she regard it?”

The Chancellor hesitated. “Like most young women, she would prefer making her own choice. But that,” he added hastily, “is but a whim. She is a lovable and amiable girl. When the time comes she will be willing enough.”

Karl stared out through one of the heavily curtained windows. He was not so sure. And the time had gone by when he would have enjoyed the taming of a girl. Now he wanted peace—was he not paying a price for it?—and children to inherit his well-managed kingdom. And perhaps—who knows?—a little love. His passionate young days were behind him, but he craved something that his unruly life had not brought him. Before him rose a vision of Hedwig her frank eyes, her color that rose and fell, her soft, round body.

“You have no reason to believe that she has looked elsewhere?”

“None, sire,” said the Chancellor stoutly.

By late afternoon all was arranged, papers signed and witnessed, and the two signatures affixed, the one small and cramped—a soldier’s hand; the other bold and flowing—the scrawl of a king. And Hedwig, save for the ceremony, was the bride of Karl of Karnia.

It was then that the Chancellor rose and stretched his legs. “And now, sire,” he said, “since we are friends and no longer enemies, you will, I know, release that mad boy of mine.”

“When do you start back?”

“Within an hour.”

“Before that time,” said Karl, “you shall have him, Chancellor.”

And with that Mettlich was forced to be content. He trusted Karl no more now than he ever had. But he made his adieus with no hint of trouble in his face.

Karl waited until the machine drove away. He had gone to the doorstep with the Chancellor, desiring to do him all possible honor. But Mettlich unaccustomed to democratic ways, disapproved of the proceeding, and was indeed extremely uncomfortable, and drew a sigh of relief when it was all over. He was of the old order which would keep its royalties on gilded thrones and, having isolated there in grandeur, have gone about the business of the kingdom without them.

Karl stood for a moment in the open air. It was done, then, and well done. It was hard to realize. He turned to the west, where for so long behind the mountains had lurked an enemy. A new era was opening; peace, disarmament, a quiet and prosperous land. He had spent his years of war and women. That was over.

From far away in the forest he heard the baying of the hounds. The crisp air filled his lungs. And even as he watched, a young doe, with rolling eyes, leaped across the drive. Karl watched it with coolly speculative eyes.

When he returned to the study the agent Kaiser was already there. In the democracy of the lodge men came and went almost at will. But Karl, big with plans for the future, would have been alone, and eyed the agent with disfavor.

“Well?” he demanded.

“We have been able to search the Chancellor’s rooms, sire,” the agent said, “for the articles mentioned last night—a card-case, gloves, and a silk handkerchief, belonging to the prisoner upstairs. He is Captain Larisch, aide-de-camp to the Crown Prince of Livonia.”

He had, expected Karl to be, impressed. But Karl only looked at him. “I know that,” he said coldly. “You are always just a little late with your information, Kaiser.”

Something like malice showed in the agent’s face. “Then you also know, sire, that it is this Captain Larisch with whom rumor couples the name of the Princess Hedwig.” He stepped back a pace or two at sight of Karl’s face. “You requested such information, sire.”

For answer, Karl pointed to the door.

For some time after he had dismissed the agent, Karl paced his library alone. Kaiser brought no unverified information. Therefore the thing was true. Therefore he had had his enemy in his hand, and now was pledged to let him go. For a time, then, Karl paid the penalty of many misdeeds. His triumph was ashes in his mouth.

What if this boy, infatuated with Hedwig, had hidden somewhere on the road Olga Loschek’s letter? What, then, if he recovered it and took it to Hedwig? What if— But at last he sent for the prisoner upstairs, and waited for him with both jealousy and fear in his eyes.

Five minutes later Nikky Larisch was ushered into the red study, and having bowed, an insolent young bow at that, stood and eyed the King.

“I have sent for you to release you,” said Karl. Nikky drew a long breath. “I am grateful, sire.”

“You have been interceded for by the Chancellor of Livonia, General Mettlich, who has just gone.”

Nikky bowed.

“Naturally, since you said nothing, of your identity, we could not know that you belonged to His Majesty’s household. Under the circumstances, it is a pleasure to give you your freedom.”

Nikky, bowed again.

Karl fixed him with cold eyes. “But before you take leave of us,” he said ironically, “I should like the true story of the night before last. Somehow, somewhere, a letter intended for me was exchanged for a blank paper. I want that letter.”

“I know no more than you, sire. It is not reasonable that I would have taken the risk I took for an envelope containing nothing.”

“For that matter,” said His Majesty, “there was nothing reasonable about anything you did!”

And now Karl played his trump card, played it with watchful eyes on Nikky’s face. He would see if report spoke the truth, if this blue-eyed boy was in love with Hedwig. He was a jealous man, this Karl of the cold eyes, jealous and passionate. Not as a king, then, watching a humble soldier of Livonia, but as man to man, he gazed at Nikky.

“For fear that loyalty keeps you silent, I may say to you that the old troubles between Karnia and Livonia are over.”

“I do not understand, sire.”

Karl hesitated. Then, with his twisted smile, he cast the rigid etiquette of such matters to the winds. “It is very simple,” he said. “There will be no more trouble between these two neighboring countries, because a marriage has to-day been arranged—a marriage between the Princess Hedwig, His Majesty’s granddaughter, and myself.”

For a moment Nikky Larisch closed his eyes.

The anniversary of the death of Prince Hubert dawned bright and sunny. The Place showed a thin covering of snow, which clung, wet and sticky, to the trees; but by nine o’clock most of it had disappeared, and Prince Ferdinand William Otto was informed that the excursion would take place.

Two motors took the party, by back streets, to the landing-stage. In the first were Annunciata, Hedwig, and the Countess, and at the last moment Otto had salvaged Miss Braithwaite from the second car, and begged a place for her with him. A police agent sat beside the chauffeur. Also another car, just ahead, contained other agents, by Mettlich’s order before his departure—a plain black motor, without the royal arms.

In the second machine followed a part of the suite, Hedwig’s lady in waiting, two gentlemen of the Court, in parade dress, and Father Gregory, come from his monastery at Etzel to visit his old friend, the King.

At the landing-stage a small crowd had gathered on seeing the red carpet laid and the gilt ropes put up, which indicated a royal visit. A small girl, with a hastily secured bouquet in her hot hands, stood nervously waiting. In deference to the anniversary, the flowers were tied with a black ribbon!

Annunciata grumbled when she saw the crowd, and the occupants of the first car looked them over carefully. It remained for Hedwig to spy the black ribbon. In the confusion, she slipped over to the little girl, who went quite white with excitement. “They are lovely,” Hedwig whispered, “but please take off the black ribbon.” The child eyed her anxiously. “It will come to pieces, Highness.”

“Take the ribbon from your hair. It will be beautiful.”

Which was done! But, as was not unnatural, the child forgot her speech, and merely thrust the bouquet, tied with a large pink bow, into the hands of Prince Ferdinand William Otto.

“Here,” she said. It was, perhaps, the briefest, and therefore the most agreeable presentation speech the Crown Prince had ever heard.

Red carpet and gold ropes and white gloves these last on the waiting officers—made the scene rather gay. The spring sun shone on the gleaming river, on the white launch with its red velvet cushions, on the deck chairs, its striped awnings and glittering brass, on the Crown Prince, in uniform, on the bouquet and the ribbon. But somewhere, back of the quay, a band struck up a funeral march, and a beggar, sitting in the sun, put his hand to his ear.

“Of course,” he said, to no one in particular. “It is the day. I had forgotten.”

The quay receded, red carpet and all. Only the blare of the band followed them, and with the persistence of sound over water, followed them for some time. The Crown Prince put down the bouquet, and proceeded to stand near the steersman.

“When I am grown up,” he observed to that embarrassed sailor, “I hope I shall be able to steer a boat.”

The steersman looked about cautiously. The royal guests were settling themselves in chairs; with rugs over their knees. “It is very easy, Your Royal Highness,” he said. “See, a turn like this, and what happens? And the other way the same.”

Followed a five minutes during which the white launch went on a strange and devious course, and the Crown Prince grew quite hot and at least two inches taller. It was, of course, the Archduchess who discovered what was happening. She was very disagreeable about it.

The Archduchess was very disagreeable about everything that day. She was afraid to stay in the Palace, and afraid to leave it. And just when she had begun to feel calm, and the sun and fresh air were getting in their work, that wretched funeral band had brought back everything she was trying to forget.

The Countess was very gay. She said brilliant, rather heartless things that set the group to laughing, and in the intervals she eyed Hedwig with narrowed eyes and hate in her heart. Hedwig herself was very quiet. The bouquet had contained lilies-of-the-valley, for one thing.

Miss Braithwaite knitted, and watched that the Crown Prince kept his white gloves clean.

Just before they left the Palace the Archduchesss had had a moment of weakening, but the Countess had laughed away her fears.

“I really think I shall not go, after all,” Annunciata had said nervously. “There are reasons.”

The Countess had smiled mockingly. “Reasons!” she said. “I know that many things are being said. But I also know that General Mettlich is an alarmist;” purred the Countess. “And that the King is old and ill, and sees through gray glasses.”

So the Archduchess had submitted to having a plumed and inappropriate hat set high on her head, regardless of the fashion, and had pinned on two watches and gone.

It was Hedwig who showed the most depression on the trip, after all. Early that morning she had attended mass in the royal chapel. All the household had been there, and the King had been wheeled in, and had sat in his box, high in the wall, the door of which opened from his private suite.

Looking up, Hedwig had seen his gray old face set and rigid. The Court had worn black, and the chapel was draped in crepe. She had fallen on her knees and had tried dutifully to pray for the dead Hubert. But her whole soul was crying out for help for herself.

So now she sat very quiet, and wondered about things.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto sat by the rail and watched the green banks flying by. In one place a group of children were sailing a tiny boat from the bank. It was only a plank, with a crazy cotton sail. They shoved it off and watched while the current seized it and carried it along. Then they cheered, and called good-bye to it.

The Crown Prince leaned over the rail, and when the current caught it, he cheered too, and waved his cap. He was reproved, of course, and some officious person insisted on tucking the rug around his royal legs. But when no one was looking, he broke a flower from the bouquet and flung it overboard. He pretended that it was a boat, and was going down to Karnia, filled with soldiers ready to fight.

But the thought of soldiers brought Nikky to his mind. His face clouded. “It’s very strange about Nikky,” he said. “He is away somewhere. I wish he had sent word he was going.”

Hedwig looked out over the river.

The Archduchess glanced at Miss Braithwaite. “There is no news?” she asked, in an undertone.

“None,” said Miss Braithwaite.

A sudden suspicion rose in Hedwig’s mind, and made her turn pale. What if they had sent him away? Perhaps they feared him enough for that! If that were true, she would never know. She knew the ways of the Palace well enough for that. In a sort of terror she glanced around the group, so comfortably disposed. Her mother was looking out, with her cool, impassive gaze. Miss Braithwaite knitted. The Countess, however, met her eyes, and there was something strange in them: triumph and a bit of terror, too, had she but read them. For the Countess had put in her plea for a holiday and had been refused.

The launch drew up near the fort, and the Crown Prince’s salute of a certain number of guns was fired. The garrison was drawn up in line, and looked newly shaved and very, very neat. And the officers came out and stood on the usual red carpet, and bowed deeply, after which they saluted the Crown Prince and he saluted them. Then the Colonel in charge shook hands all round, and the band played. It was all very ceremonious and took a lot of tine.

The new fortress faced the highroad some five miles from the Karnian border. It stood on a bluff over the river, and was, as the Crown Prince decided, not so unlike the desk, after all, except that it had a moat around it.

Hedwig and the Countess went with the party around the fortifications. The Archduchess and Miss Braithwaite had sought a fire. Only the Countess, however, seemed really interested. Hedwig seemed more intent on the distant line of the border than on anything else. She stood on a rampart and stared out at it, looking very sad. Even the drill—when at a word all the great guns rose and peeped over the edge at the valley below, and then dropped back again as if they had seen enough—even this failed to rouse her.

“I wish you would listen, Hedwig,” said the Crown Prince, almost fretfully. “It’s so interesting. The enemy’s soldiers would come up the river in boats, and along that road on foot. And then we would raise the guns and shoot at them. And the guns would drop back again, before the enemy had time to aim at them.”

But Hedwig’s interest was so evidently assumed that he turned to the Countess. The Countess professed smiling terror, and stood a little way back from the guns, looking on. But Prince Ferdinand William Otto at last coaxed her to the top of the emplacement.

“There’s a fine view up there,” he urged. “And the guns won’t hurt you. There’s nothing in them.”

To get up it was necessary to climb an iron ladder. Hedwig was already there. About a dozen young officers had helped her up, and ruined as many pairs of white gloves, although Hedwig could climb like a cat, and really needed no help at all.

“You go up,” said the Crown Prince eagerly. “I’ll hold your bag, so you can climb.”

He caught her handbag from her, and instantly something snapped in it. The Countess was climbing up the ladder. Rather dismayed, Prince Ferdinand William Otto surveyed the bag. Something had broken, he feared. And in another moment he saw what it was. The little watch which was set in one side of it had slipped away, leaving a round black hole. His heart beat a trifle faster.

“I’m awfully worried,” he called up to her, as he climbed. “I’m afraid I’ve broken your bag. Something clicked, and the watch is gone. It is not on the ground.”

It was well for the Countess that the Colonel was talking to Hedwig. Well for her, too, that the other officers were standing behind with their eyes worshipfully on the Princess. The Countess turned gray-white.

“Don’t worry, Highness,” she said, with stiff lips, “The watch falls back sometimes. I must have it repaired.”

But long after the tour of the ramparts was over, after ammunition-rooms had been visited, with their long lines of waiting shells, after the switchboard which controlled the river mines had been inspected and explained, she was still trembling.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto, looking at the bag later on, saw the watch in place and drew a long breath of relief.

Old Adelbert of the Opera had lost his position. No longer, a sausage in his pocket for refreshment, did he leave his little room daily for the Opera. A young man, who made ogling eyes at Olga, of the garde-robe, and who was not careful to keep the lenses clean, had taken his place.

He was hurt in his soldier’s soul. There was no longer a place in the kingdom for those who had fought for it. The cry was for the young. And even in the first twenty-four hours a subtle change went on in him. His loyalty, on which he had built his creed of life, turned to bitterness.

The first day of his idleness he wandered into the back room of the cobbler’s shop near by, where the butter-seller from the corner, the maker of artificial flowers for graves, and the cobbler himself were gathered, and listened without protest to such talk as would have roused him once to white anger.

But the iron had not yet gone very deep, and one thing he would not permit. It was when, in the conversation, one of them attacked the King. Then indeed he was roused to fury.

“A soldier and a gentleman,” he said. “For him I lost this leg of mine, and lost it without grieving. When I lay in the hospital he himself came, and—”

A burst of jeering laughter greeted this, for he had told it many times. Told it, because it was all he had instead of a leg, and although he could not walk on it, certainly it had supported him through many years.

“As for the little Crown Prince,” he went on firmly, “I have seen him often. He came frequently to the Opera. He has a fine head and a bright smile. He will be a good king.”

But this was met with silence.

Once upon a time a student named Haeckel had occasionally backed him up in his defense of the royal family. But for some reason or other Haeckel came no more, and old Adelbert missed him. He had inquired for him frequently.

“Where is the boy Haeckle?” he had asked one day. “I have not seen him lately.”

No one had replied. But a sort of grim silence settled over the little room. Old Adelbert, however, was not discerning.

“Perhaps, as a student, he worked too hard” he had answered his own question. “They must both work and play hard, these students. A fine lot of young men. I have watched them at the Opera. Most of them preferred Italian to German music.”

But, that first day of idleness, when he had left the cobbler’s, he resolved not to return. They had not been unfriendly, but he had seen at once there was a difference. He was no longer old Adelbert of the Opera. He was an old man only, and out of work.

He spent hours that first free afternoon repairing his frayed linen and his shabby uniform, with his wooden leg stretched out before him and his pipe clutched firmly in his teeth. Then, freshly shaved and brushed, he started on a painful search after work. With no result. And, indeed, he was hopeless before he began. He was old and infirm. There was little that he had even the courage to apply for.

True, he had his small pension, but it came only twice a year, and was sent, intact, to take care of an invalid daughter in the country. That was not his. He never used a penny of it. And he had saved a trifle, by living on air; as the concierge declared. But misfortunes come in threes, like fires and other calamities. The afternoon of that very day brought a letter, saying that the daughter was worse and must have an operation. Old Adelbert went to church and burned a candle for her recovery, and from there to the bank, to send by registered mail the surgeon’s fee.

He was bankrupt in twenty-four hours.

That evening in his extremity he did a reckless thing. He wrote a letter to the King. He spent hours over it, first composing it in pencil and then copying it with ink borrowed from the concierge. It began “Sire,” as he had learned was the form, and went on to remind His Majesty, first, of the hospital incident, which, having been forty years ago, might have slipped the royal memory. Then came the facts—his lost position, his daughter, the handicap of his wooden leg. It ended with a plea for reinstatement or, failing that, for any sort of work.

He sent it, unfolded, in a large flat envelope, which also he had learned was the correct thing with kings, who for some reason or other do not like folded communications. Then he waited. He considered that a few hours should bring a return.

No answer came. No answer ever came. For the King was ill, and secretaries carefully sifted the royal mail.

He waited all of the next day, and out of the mixed emotions of his soul confided the incident of the letter to Humbert, in his bureau below.

The concierge smiled in his beard. “What does the King care?” he demanded. “He will never see that letter. And if he did—you have lived long, my friend. Have you ever known the King to give, or to do anything but take? Name me but one instance.”

And that night, in the concierge’s bureau, he was treated to many incidents, all alike. The Government took, but gave nothing. As well expect blood out of a stone. Instances were given, heartlessness piled on heartlessness, one sordid story on another.

And as he listened there died in old Adelbert’s soul his flaming love for his sovereign and his belief in him. His eyes took on a hard and haunted look. That night he walked past the Palace and shook his fist at it. He was greatly ashamed of that, however, and never repeated it. But his soul was now an open sore, ready for infection.

And Black Humbert bided his time.

On the day of the excursion to the fortress old Adelbert decided to appeal to his fellow lodger, Herman Spier. Now and then, when he was affluent, he had paid small tribute to Herman by means of the camp cookery on which he prided himself.

“A soldier’s mess!” he would say, and bring in a bowl of soup, or a slice of deer meat, broiled over hot coals in his tiny stove. “Eat it, man. These restaurants know nothing of food.”

To Herman now he turned for advice and help. It was difficult to find the clerk. He left early, and often came home after midnight in a curious frame of mind, a drunkenness of excitement that was worse than that of liquor.

Herman could not help him. But he eyed the old soldier appraisingly. He guessed shrewdly the growing uneasiness behind Adelbert’s brave front. If now one could enlist such a man for the Cause, that would be worth doing. He had talked it over with the concierge. Among the veterans the old man was influential, and by this new policy of substituting fresh blood for stale, the Government had made many enemies among them.

“In a shop!” he said coldly. “With that leg? No, my friend. Two legs are hardly enough for what we have to do.”

“Then, for any sort of work. I could sweep and clean.”

“I shall inquire,” said Herman Spier. But he did not intend to. He had other plans.

The old man’s bitterness had been increased by two things. First, although he had been dismissed without notice, in the middle of the week, he had been paid only up to the hour of leaving. That was a grievance. Second, being slow on his feet, one of the royal motorcars had almost run him down, and the police had cursed him roundly for being in the way.

“Why be angry?” observed the concierge, on this being reported to him. “The streets are the King’s. Who are the dogs of pedestrians but those that pay the taxes to build them?”

At last he determined to find Haeckel, the student. He did not know his Christian name, nor where he lodged. But he knew the corps he belonged to, by his small gray cap with a red band.

He was very nervous when he made this final effort. Corps houses were curious places, he had heard, and full of secrets. Even the great professors from the University might not enter without invitation. And his experience had been that students paid small respect to uniforms or to age. In truth, he passed the building twice before he could summon courage to touch the great brass knocker. And the arrogance of its clamor, when at last he rapped, startled him again. But here at least he need not have feared.

The student who was also doorkeeper eyed him kindly. “Well, comrade?” he said.

“I am seeking a student named Haeckel, of this corps,” said old Adelbert stoutly.

And had violated all etiquette, too, had he but known it!

“Haeckle?” repeated the doorkeeper. “I think—come in, comrade. I will inquire.”

For the name of Haeckel was, just then, one curiously significant.

He disappeared, and old Adelbert waited. When the doorkeeper returned, it was to tell him to follow him, and to lead the way downstairs.

There dawned on the old man’s eyes a curious sight. In a long basement room were perhaps thirty students, each armed with a foil, and wearing a wire mask. A half dozen lay figures on springs stood in the center in a low row, and before these perspiring youths thrust and parried. Some of them, already much scarred, stood and watched. This, then, was where the students prepared themselves for duels. Here they fought the mimic battles that were later on to lead to the much-prized scars.

Old Adelbert stared with curious, rather scornful eyes. The rapier he detested. Give him a saber, and a free field, and he would show them. Even yet, he felt, he had not lost his cunning. And the saber requires cunning as well as strength.

Two or three students came toward him at once. “You are seeking Haeckle?” one of them asked.

“I am. I knew him, but not well. Lately, however, I have thought—is he here?”

The students exchanged glances. “He is not here,” one said. “Where did you know him?”

“He came frequently to a shop I know of—a cobbler’s shop, a neighborhood meeting-place. A fine lad. I liked him. But recently he has not come, and knowing his corps, I came here to find him.”

They had hoped to learn something from him, and he knew nothing. “He has disappeared,” they told him. “He is not at his lodging, and he has left his classes. He went away suddenly, leaving everything. That is all we know.”

It sounded sinister. Old Adelbert, heavy-hearted, turned away and climbed again to the street. That gateway was closed, too. And he felt a pang of uneasiness. What could have happened to the boy? Was the world, after all, only a place of trouble?

But now came good fortune, and, like evil, it came not singly. The operation was over, and his daughter on the mend. The fee was paid also. And the second followed on the heels of the first.

He did not like Americans. Too often, in better days, had he heard the merits of the American republic compared with the shortcomings of his own government. When, as happened now and then, he met the American family on the staircase, he drew sharply aside that no touch of republicanism might contaminate his uniform.

On that day, however, things changed.

First of all, he met the American lad in the hallway, and was pleased to see him doff his bit of a cap. Not many, nowadays, uncovered a head to him. The American lad was going down; Adelbert was climbing, one step at a time, and carrying a small basket of provisions.

The American boy, having passed, turned, hesitated, went back. “I’d like to carry that for you, if you don’t mind.”

“Carry it?”

“I am very strong,” said the American boy stoutly.

So Adelbert gave up his basket, and the two went up. Four long flights of stone stairs led to Adelbert’s room. The ascent took time and patience.

At the door Adelbert paused. Then, loneliness overcoming prejudice, “Come in,” he said.

The bare little room appealed to the boy. “It’s very nice, it?” he said. “There’s nothing to fall over.”

“And but little to sit on,” old Adelbert added dryly. “However, two people require but two chairs. Here is one.”

But the boy would not sit down. He ranged the room, frankly curious, exclaimed at the pair of ring doves who lived in a box tied to the window-sill, and asked for crumbs for them. Adelbert brought bread from his small store.

The boy cheered him. His interest in the old saber, the intentness with which he listened to its history, the politeness with which he ignored his host’s infirmity, all won the old man’s heart.

These Americans downstairs were not all bad, then. They were too rich, of course. No one should have meat three times a day, as the meat-seller reported they did. And they were paying double rent for the apartment below. But that, of course, they could not avoid, not knowing the real charge.

The boy was frankly delighted. And when old Adelbert brought forth from his basket a sausage and, boiling it lightly, served him a slice between two pieces of bread, an odd friendship was begun that was to have unforeseen consequences. They had broken bread together.

Between the very old and the very young come sometimes these strong affections. Perhaps it is that age harkens back to the days of its youth, and by being very old, becomes young again. Or is it that children are born old, with the withered, small faces of all the past, and must, year by year, until their maturity, shed this mantle of age?

Gradually, over the meal, and the pigeons, and what not, old Adelbert unburdened his heart. He told of his years at the Opera, where he had kept his glasses clean and listened to the music until he knew by heart even the most difficult passages. He told of the Crown Prince, who always wished opera-glasses, not because he needed them, but because he liked to turn them wrong end before, and thus make the audience appear at a great distance. And then he told of the loss of his position.

The American lad listened politely, but his mind was on the Crown Prince. “Does he wear a crown?” he demanded. “I saw him once in a carriage, but I think he had a hat.”

“At the coronation he will wear a crown.”

“Do people do exactly what he tells them?”

Old Adelbert was not certain. He hedged, rather. “Probably, whenever it is good for him.”

“Huh! What’s the use of being a prince?” observed the boy, who had heard of privileges being given that way before. “When will he be a king?”

“When the old King dies. He is very old now. I was in a hospital once, after a battle. And he came in. He put his hand on my shoulder, like this” he illustrated it on the child’s small one—and said— Considering that old Adelbert no longer loved his King, it is strange to record that his voice broke.

“Will he die soon?” Bobby put in. He found kings as much of a novelty as to Prince Ferdinand William Otto they were the usual thing. Bobby’s idea of kings, however, was of the “off with his head” order.

“Who knows? But when he does, the city will learn at once. The great bell of the Cathedral, which never rings save at such times, will toll. They say it is a sound never to be forgotten. I, of course, have never heard it. When it tolls, all in the city will fall on their knees and pray. It is the custom.” Bobby, reared to strict Presbyterianism and accustomed to kneeling but once a day, and that at night beside his bed, in the strict privacy of his own apartment, looked rather startled. “What will they pray for?” he said.

And old Adelbert, with a new bitterness, replied that the sons of kings needed much prayer. Sometimes they were hard and did cruel things.

“And then the Crown Prince will be a king,” Bobby reflected. “If I were a king, I’d make people stand around. And I’d have an automobile and run it myself. But has the Crown Prince only a grandfather, and no father?”

“He died—the boy’s father. He was murdered, and the Princess his mother also.”

Bobby’s eyes opened wide. “Who did it?”

“Terrorists,” said old Adelbert. And would not be persuaded to say more.

That night at dinner Bobby Thorpe delivered himself of quite a speech. He sat at the table, and now and then, when the sour-faced governess looked at her plate, he slipped a bit of food to his dog, which waited beside him.

“There’s a very nice old man upstairs,” he said. “He has a fine sword, and ring-doves, and a wooden leg. And he used to rent opera-glasses to the Crown Prince, only he turned them around. I’m going to try that with yours, mother. We had sausage together, and he has lost his position, and he’s never been on the Scenic Railway, father. I’d like some tickets for him. He would like riding, I’m sure, because walking must be pretty hard. And what I want to know is this: Why can’t you give him a job, father?”

Bobby being usually taciturn at the table, and entirely occupied with food, the family stared at him.

“What sort of a job, son? A man with one leg!”

“He doesn’t need legs to chop tickets with.”

The governess listened. She did not like Americans. Barbarians they were, and these were of the middle class, being in trade. For a scenic railway is trade, naturally. Except that they paid a fat salary, with an extra month at Christmas, she would not be there. She and Pepy, the maid, had many disputes about this. But Pepy was a Dalmatian, and did not matter.

“He means the old soldier upstairs,” said Bobby’s mother softly. She was a gentle person. Her eyes were wide and childlike, and it was a sort of religion of the family to keep them full of happiness.

This also the governess could not understand.

“So the old soldier is out of work,” mused the head of the family. Head, thought the governess! When they wound him about their fingers! She liked men of sterner stuff. In her mountain country the men did as they wished, and sometimes beat their wives by way of showing their authority. Under no circumstances, she felt, would this young man ever beat his wife. He was a weakling.

The weakling smiled across the table at the wife with the soft eyes. “How about it, mother?” he asked. “Shall the firm of ‘Bobby and I’ offer him a job?”

“I would like it very much,” said the weakling’s wife, dropping her eyes to hide the pride in them.

“Suppose,” said the weakling, “that you run up after dinner, Bob, and bring him down. Now sit still, young man, and finish. There’s no such hurry as that.”

And in this fashion did old Adelbert become ticket-chopper of the American Scenic Railway.

And in this fashion, too, commenced that odd friendship between him and the American lad that was to have so vital an effect on the very life itself of the Crown Prince Ferdinand William Otto of Livonia.

Late that evening, old Adelbert’s problem having been solved, Pepy the maid and Bobby had a long talk. It concerned itself mainly with kings. Pepy sat in a low chair by the tiled stove in the kitchen, and knitted a stocking with a very large foot.

“What I want to know is this,” said Bobby, swinging his legs on the table: “What are the Terrorists?”

Pepy dropping her knitting, and stared with open mouth. “What know you of such things?” she demanded.

“Well, Terrorists killed the Crown Prince’s father, and—”

Quite suddenly Pepy leaped from her chair, and covered Bobby’s mouth with her hand. “Hush!” she said, and stared about her with frightened eyes. The door into the dining-room was open, and the governess sat there with a book. Then, in a whisper: “They are everywhere. No one knows who they are, nor where they meet.” The superstition of her mountains crept into her voice. “It is said that they have the assistance of the evil one, and that the reason the police cannot find them is because they take the form of cats. I myself,” she went on impressively, “crossing the Place one night late, after spending the evening with a friend, saw a line of cats moving in the shadows. One of them stopped and looked at me.” Pepy crossed herself. “It had a face like the Fraulein in there.”

Bobby stared with interest through the doorway. The governess did look like a cat. She had staring eyes, and a short, wide face. “Maybe’s she’s one of them,” he reflected aloud.

“Oh, for God’s sake, hush!” cried Pepy, and fell to knitting rapidly. Nor could Bobby elicit anything further from her. But that night, in his sleep, he saw a Crown Prince, dressed in velvet and ermine, being surrounded and attacked by an army of cats, and went, shivering, to crawl into his mother’s bed.

On the evening of the annual day of mourning, the party returned from the fortress. The Archduchess slept. The Crown Prince talked, mostly to Hedwig, and even she said little. After a time the silence affected the boy’s high spirits. He leaned back in his chair on the deck of the launch, and watched the flying landscape. He counted the riverside shrines to himself. There were, he discovered, just thirteen between the fortress and the city limits.

Old Father Gregory sat beside him. He had taken off his flat black hat, and it lay on his knee. The ends of his black woolen sash fluttered in the wind, and he sat, benevolent hands folded, looking out.

From guns to shrines is rather a jump, and the Crown Prince found it difficult.

“Do you consider fighting the duty of a Christian?” inquired the Crown Prince suddenly.

Father Gregory, whose mind had been far away, with his boys’ school at Etzel, started.

“Fighting? That depends. To defend his home is the Christian duty of every man.”

“But during the last war,” persisted Otto, “we went across the mountains and killed a lot of people. Was that a Christian duty?”

Father Gregory coughed. He had himself tucked up his soutane and walked forty miles to join the army of invasion, where he had held services, cared for the wounded, and fired a rifle, all with equal spirit. He changed the subject to the big guns at the fortress.

“I think,” observed the Crown Prince, forgetting his scruples, “that if you have a pencil and an old envelope to draw on, I’ll invent a big gun myself.”

Which he proceeded to do, putting in a great many wheels and levers, and adding, a folding-table at the side on which the gunners might have afternoon tea—this last prompted by the arrival just then of cups and saucers and a tea service.

It was almost dark when the launch arrived at the quay. The red carpet was still there, and another crowd. Had Prince Ferdinand William Otto been less taken up with finding one of his kid gloves, which he had lost, he would have noticed that there was a scuffle going on at the very edge of the red carpet, and that the beggar of the morning was being led away, between two policemen, while a third, running up the river bank, gingerly deposited a small round object in the water, and stood back. It was merely one of the small incidents of a royal outing, and was never published in the papers. But Father Gregory, whose old eyes were far-sighted, had seen it all. His hand—the hand of the Church—was on the shoulder of the Crown Prince as they landed.

The boy looked around for the little girl of the bouquet. He took an immense interest in little girls, partly because he seldom saw any. But she was gone.

When the motor which had taken them from the quay reached the Palace, Hedwig roused the Archduchess, whose head had dropped forward on her chest. “Here we are, mother,” she said. “You have had a nice sleep.”

But Annunciata muttered something about being glad the wretched day was over, and every one save Prince Ferdinand William Otto seemed glad to get back. The boy was depressed. He felt, somehow, that they should have enjoyed it, and that, having merely endured it, they had failed him again.

He kissed his aunt’s hand dutifully when he left her, and went with a lagging step to his own apartments. His request to have Hedwig share his supper had met with a curt negative.

The Countess, having left her royal mistress in the hands of her maids, went also to her own apartment. She was not surprised, on looking into her mirror, to find herself haggard and worn. It had been a terrible day. Only a second had separated that gaping lens in her bag from the eyes of the officers about. Never, in an adventurous life, had she felt so near to death. Even now its cold breath chilled her.

However, that was over, well over. She had done well, too. A dozen pictures of the fortress, of its guns, of even its mine chart as it hung on a wall, were in the bag. Its secrets, so securely held, were hers, and would be Karl’s.

It was a cunningly devised scheme. Two bags, exactly alike as to appearance, had been made. One, which she carried daily, was what it appeared to be. The other contained a camera, tiny but accurate, with a fine lens. When a knob of the fastening was pressed, the watch slid aside and the shutter snapped. The pictures when enlarged had proved themselves perfect.

Pleading fatigue, she dismissed her maid and locked the doors. Then she opened the sliding panel, and unfastened the safe. The roll of film was in her hand, ready to be deposited under the false bottom of her jewel-case.

Within the security of her room, the Countess felt at ease. The chill of the day left her, to be followed by a glow of achievement. She even sang a little, a bit of a ballad from her native mountains:

He has gone to the mountains, The far green mountains. (Hear the cattle lowing as they drive them up the hill!) When he comes down he’ll love me; When he comes down he’ll marry me. (But what is this that touches me with fingers dead and chill?)

Still singing, she carried the jewel-case to her table, and sat down before it. Then she put a hand to her throat.

The lock had been forced.

A glance about showed her that her code-book was gone. In the tray above, her jewels remained untouched; her pearl collar, the diamond knickknacks the Archduchess had given her on successive Christmases, even a handful of gold coins, all were safe enough. But the code-book was gone.

Then indeed did the Countess look death in the face and found it terrible. For a moment she could not so much as stand without support. It was then that she saw a paper folded under her jewels and took it out with shaking fingers. In fine, copperplate script she read:

The Committee of Ten! This thing had happened to her. Then it was true that the half-mythical Committee of Ten existed, that this terror of Livonia was a real terror, which had her by the throat. For there was no escape. None. Now indeed she knew that rumor spoke the truth, and that the Terrorists were everywhere. In daylight they had entered her room. They had known of the safe, known of the code. Known how much else?

Wild ideas of flight crossed her mind, to be as instantly abandoned for their futility. Where could she go that they would not follow her? When she had reacted from her first shock she fell to pondering the matter, pro and con. What could they want of her? If she was an enemy to the country, so were they. But even that led nowhere, for after all, the Terrorists were not enemies to Livonia. They claimed indeed to be its friends, to hold in their hands its future and its betterment. Enemies of the royal house they were, of course.

She was nearly distracted by that time. She was a brave woman, physically and mentally of hard fiber, but the very name signed to the paper set her nerves to twitching. It was the Committee of Ten which had murdered Prince Hubert and his young wife; the Committee of Ten which had exploded a bomb in the very Palace itself, and killed old Breidau, of the King’s Council; the Committee of Ten which had burned the Government House, and had led the mob in the student riots a year or so before.

Led them, themselves hidden. For none knew their identity. It was said that they did not even know each other, wearing masks and long cloaks at their meetings, and being designated by numbers only.

In this dread presence, then, she would find herself that night! For she would go. There was no way out.

She sent a request to be excused from dinner on the ground of illness, and was, as a result, visited by her royal mistress at nine o’clock. The honor was unexpected. Not often did the Archduchess Annunciata so favor any one. The Countess, lying across her bed in a perfect agony of apprehension, staggered into her sitting-room and knelt to kiss her lady’s hand.

But the Archduchess, who had come to scoff, believing not at all in the illness, took one shrewd glance at her, and put her hands behind her.

“It may be, as you say, contagious, Olga,” she said. “You would better go to bed and stay there. I shall send Doctor Wiederman to you.”

When she had gone the Countess rang for her maid. She was cool enough now, and white, with a cruel line about her mouth that Minna knew well. She went to the door into the corridor, and locked it.

Then she turned on the maid. “I am ready for you, now.”

“Madame will retire?”

“You little fool! You know what I am ready for!”

The maid stood still. Her wide, bovine eyes, filled with alarm, watched the Countess as she moved swiftly across the room to her wardrobe. When she turned about again, she held in her hand a thin black riding-crop. Minna’s ruddy color faded. She knew the Loscheks, knew their furies. Strange stories of unbridled passion had oozed from the old ruined castle where for so long they had held feudal sway over the countryside.

“Madame!” she cried, and fell on her knees. “What have I done? Oh, what have I done?”

“That is what you will tell me,” said the Countess, and brought down the crop. A livid stripe across the girl’s face turned slowly to red.

“I have done nothing, I swear it. Mother of Pity, help me! I have done nothing.”

The crop descended again, this time on one of the great sleeves of her peasant costume. So thin it was, so brutal the blow, that it cut into the muslin. Groaning, the girl fell forward on her face. The Countess continued to strike pitiless blows into which she put all her fury, her terror, her frayed and ragged nerves.

The girl on the floor, from whimpering, fell to crying hard, with great noiseless sobs of pain and bewilderment. When at last the blows ceased, she lay still.

The Countess prodded her with her foot. “Get up,” she commanded.

But she was startled when she saw the girl’s face. It was she who was the fool. The welt would tell its own story, and the other servants would talk. It was already a deep purple, and swollen. Both women were trembling. The Countess, still holding the crop, sat down.

“Now!” she said. “You will tell me to whom you gave a certain small book of which you know.”

“I, madame?”

“You.”

“But what book? I have given nothing, madame. I swear it.”

“Then you admitted some one to this room?”

“No one, madame, except—” She hesitated.

“Well?”

“There came this afternoon the men who clean madame’s windows. No one else, madame.”

She put her hand to her cheek, and looked furtively to see if her fingers were stained with blood. The Countess, muttering, fell to furious pacing of the room. So that was it, of course. The girl was telling the truth. She was too stupid to lie. Then the Committee of Ten indeed knew everything—had known that she would be away, had known of the window cleaners, had known of the safe, and her possession of the code.

Cold and calculating rage filled her. Niburg had played her false, of course. But Niburg was only a go-between. He had known nothing of the codebook. He had given the Committee the letter, and by now they knew all that it told. What did it not know?

She dismissed the girl and put away the riding-crop, then she smoothed the disorder of her hair and dress. The court physician, calling a half hour later, found her reading on a chaise longue in her boudoir, looking pale and handsome; and spent what he considered a pleasant half-hour with her. He loved gossip, and there was plenty just now. Indications were that they would have a wedding soon. An unwilling bride, perhaps, eh? But a lovely one. For him, he was glad that Karnia was to be an ally, and not an enemy. He had seen enough of wars. And so on and on, while the Countess smiled and nodded, and shivered in her very heart.

At eleven o’clock he went away, kissing her hand rather more fervently than professionally, although his instinct to place his fingers over the pulse rather spoiled the effect. One thing, however, the Countess had gained by his visit. He was to urge on the Archduchess the necessity for an immediate vacation for her favorite.

“Our loss, Countess,” he said, with heavy gallantry.. “But we cannot allow beauty to languish for need of mountain air.”

Then at last he was gone, and she went about her heavy-hearted preparations for the night. From a corner of her wardrobe she drew a long peasant’s cape, such a cape as Minna might wear. Over her head, instead of a hat, she threw a gray veil. A careless disguise, but all that was necessary. The sentries through and about the Palace were not unaccustomed to such shrouded figures slipping out from its gloom to light, and perhaps to love.

Before she left, she looked about the room. What assurance had she that this very excursion was not a trap, and that in her absence the vault would not he looted again? It contained now something infinitely valuable—valuable and incriminating—the roll of film. She glanced about, and seeing a silver vase of roses, hurriedly emptied the water out, wrapped the film in oiled paper, and dropped it down among the stems.

The Street of the Wise Virgins was not near the Palace. Even by walking briskly she was in danger of being late. The wind kept her back, too. The cloak twisted about her, the veil whipped. She turned once or twice to see if she were being followed, but the quiet streets were empty. Then, at last, the Street of the Wise Virgins and the fiacre, standing at the curb, with a driver wrapped in rugs against the cold of the February night, and his hat pulled down over his eyes. The Countess stopped beside him.

“You are expecting a passenger?”

“Yes, madame.”

With her hand on the door, the Countess realized that the fiacre was already occupied. As she peered into its darkened interior, the shadow resolved itself into a cloaked and masked figure. She shrank back.

“Enter, madame,” said a voice.

The figure appalled her. It was not sufficient to know that behind the horrifying mask which covered the entire face and head, there was a human figure, human pulses that beat, human eyes that appraised her. She hesitated.

“Quickly,” said the voice.

She got in, shrinking into a corner of the carriage.

Her lips were dry, the roaring of terror was in her ears. The door closed.

Then commenced a drive of which afterward the Countess dared not think. The figure neither moved nor spoke. Inside the carriage reigned the most complete silence. The horse’s feet clattered over rough stones, they turned through narrow, unfamiliar streets, so that she knew not even the direction they took. After a time the noise grew less. The horse padded along dirt roads, in darkness. Then the carriage stopped, and at last the shrouded figure moved and spoke.

“I regret, Countess, that my orders are to blindfold you.”

She drew herself up haughtily.

“That is not necessary, I think.”

“Very necessary, madame.”

She submitted ungracefully, while he bound a black cloth over her eyes. He drew it very close and knotted it behind. In the act his—fingers touched her face, and she felt them cold and clammy. The contact sickened her.

“Your hand, madame.”

She was led out of the carriage, and across soft earth, a devious course again, as though they avoided small obstacles. Once her foot touched something low and hard, like marble. Again, in the darkness, they stumbled over a mound. She knew where she was, then—in a graveyard. But which? There were many about the city.

An open space, the opening of a gate or door that squealed softly, a flight of steps that led downward, and a breath of musty, cold air, damp and cellar-like.

She was calmer now. Had they meant to kill her, there had been already a hundred chances. It was not death, then, that awaited her—at least, not immediate death. These precautions, too, could only mean that she was to be freed again, and must not know where she had been.

At last, still in unbroken silence, she knew that they had entered a large space. Their footsteps no longer echoed and re-echoed. Her guide walked more slowly, and at last paused, releasing her hand. She felt again the touch of his clammy fingers as he untied the knots of her bandage. He took it off.

At first she could see little. The silence remained unbroken, and only the center of the room was lighted. When her eyes grew accustomed, she made out the scene slowly.

A great stone vault, its walls broken into crypts which had contained caskets of the dead. But the caskets had been removed; and were piled in a corner, and in the niches were rifles. In the center was a pine table, curiously incongruous, and on it writing materials, a cheap clock, and a pile of documents. There were two candles only, and these were stuck in skulls—old brown skulls so infinitely removed from all semblance to the human that they were not even horrible. It was as if they had been used, not to inspire terror, but because they were at hand and convenient for the purpose. In the shadow, ranged in a semicircle, were nine figures, all motionless, all masked, and cloaked in black. They sat, another incongruity, on plain wooden chairs. But in spite of that they were figures of dread. The one who had brought her made the tenth.

Still the silence, broken only by the drip of water from the ceiling into a tin pail.

Had she not known the past record of the men before her, the rather opera bouffe setting with which they chose to surround themselves might have aroused her scorn. But Olga Loschek knew too much. She guessed shrewdly that, with the class of men with whom they dealt, it was not enough that their name spelled terror. They must visualize it. They had taken their cue from that very church, indeed, beneath which they hid. The church, with its shrines and images, appealed to the eye. They, too, appealed to the eye. Their masks, the carefully constructed and upheld mystery of their identity, the trappings of death about them—it was skillfully done.

Not that she was thinking consecutively just then. It was a mental flash, even as her eyes, growing accustomed to the darkness made out the white numeral, from one to ten, on the front of each shroud-like cloak.

Still no one spoke. The Countess faced them.

Only her eyes showed her nervousness; she stood haughtily, her head held high. But like most women, she could not endure silence for long, at least the silence of shrouded figures and intent eyes.

“Now that I am here,” she demanded, “may I ask why I have been summoned?”

It was Number Seven who replied. It was Number Seven who, during the hour that followed, spoke for the others. None moved, or but slightly. There was no putting together of heads, no consulting. Evidently all had been carefully prearranged.

“Look on the table, Countess. You will find there some papers you will perhaps recognize.”

She took a step toward the table and glanced down. The code-book lay there. Also the letter she had sent by Peter Niburg. She made no effort to disclaim them.

“I recognize them,” she said clearly.

“You acknowledge, then, that they are yours?”

“I acknowledge nothing.”

“They bear certain indications, madame.”

“Possibly.”

“Do you realize what will happen, madame, if these papers are turned over to the authorities?”

She shrugged her shoulders. And now Number Seven rose, a tall figure of mystery, and spoke at length in a cultivated, softly intoned voice. The Countess, listening, felt the voice vaguely familiar, as were the burning eyes behind the mask.

“It is our hope, madame,” he said, “that you will make it unnecessary for the Committee of Ten to use those papers. We have no quarrel with women. We wish rather a friend than an enemy. There be those, many of them, who call us poor patriots, who would tear down without building up. They are wrong. The Committee of Ten, to those who know its motives, has the highest and most loyal of ideals—to the country.”

His voice took on a new, almost a fanatic note. He spoke as well to the other shrouded figures as to his comrades. No mean orator this. He seldom raised his voice, he made no gestures. Almost, while she listened, the Countess understood.

They had watched the gradual decay of the country, he said. Its burden of taxation grew greater each year. The masses sweated and toiled, to carry on their backs the dead weight of the aristocracy and the throne. The iron hand of the Chancellor held everything; an old King who would die, was dying now, and after that a boy, nominal ruler only, while the Chancellor continued his hard rule. And now, as if that were not enough, there was talk of an alliance with Karnia, an alliance which, carried through, would destroy the hope of a republic.

The Countess stared.

“No wall is too thick for our ears,” he continued. “Our eyes see everywhere. And as we grow in strength, they fear us. Well they may.”

He grew scornful then. To gain support for the tottering throne the Chancellor would unite the two countries, that Karl’s army, since he could not trust his own, might be called on for help. And here he touched the Countess’s raw nerves with a brutal finger.

“The price of the alliance, madame, is the Princess Hedwig in marriage. The Committee, which knows all things, believes that you have reason to dislike this marriage.”

Save that she clutched her cloak more closely, the Countess made no move. But there was a soft stir among the figures. Perhaps, after all, the Committee as a whole did not know all things.

“To prevent this alliance, madame, is our first aim. There are others to follow. But”—he bent forward—“the King will not live many days. It is our hope that that marriage will not occur before his death.”

By this time Olga Loschek knew very well where she stood. The Committee was propitiatory. She was not in danger, save as it might develop. They were, in a measure, putting their case.

She had followed the speaker closely. When he paused, she was ready for him. “But, even without a marriage, at any time now a treaty based on the marriage may be signed. A treaty for a mutually defensive alliance. Austria encroaches daily, and has Germany behind her. We are small fry, here and in Karnia, and we stand in the way.”

“King Karl has broken faith before. He will not support Livonia until he has received his price. He is determined on the marriage.”

“A marriage of expediency,” said the Countess, impatiently.

The speaker for the Committee shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps,” he replied. “Although there are those of us who think that in this matter of expediency, Karl gives more than he receives. He is to-day better prepared than we are for war. He is more prosperous. As to the treaty, it is probably already signed, or about to be. And here, madame, is the reason for our invitation to you to come here.

“I have no access to state papers,” the Countess said impatiently.

“You are too modest,” said Number Seven suavely, and glanced at the letter on the table.

“The matter lies thus, madame. The Chancellor is now in Karnia. Doubtless he will return with the agreement signed. We shall learn that in a day or so. We do not approve of this alliance for various reasons, and we intend to take steps to prevent it. The paper itself is nothing. But plainly, Countess, the need a friend in the Palace, one who is in the confidence of the royal family.”

“And for such friendship, I am to secure safety?”

“Yes, madame. But that is not all. Let me tell you briefly how things stand with us. We have, supporting us, certain bodies, workingmen’s guilds, a part of the student body, not so much of the army as we would wish. Dissatisfied folk, madame, who would exchange the emblem of tyranny for freedom. On the announcement of the King’s death, in every part of the kingdom will go up the cry of liberty. But the movement must start here. The city must rise against the throne. And against that there are two obstacles.” He paused. The clock ticked, and water dripped into the tin pail with metallic splashes. “The first is this marriage. The second—is the Crown Prince Ferdinand William Otto.”

The Countess recoiled. “No!”

“A moment, madame. You think badly of us.” Under his mask the Countess divined a cold smile. “It is not necessary to contemplate violence. There are other methods. The boy could be taken over the border, and hidden until the Republic is firmly established. After that, he is unimportant.”

The Countess, still pale, looked at him scornfully. “You do my intelligence small honor.”

“Where peaceful methods will avail, our methods are peaceful, madame.”

“It was, then, in peace that you murdered Prince Hubert?”

“The errors of the past are past.” Then, with a new sternness: “Make no mistake. Whether through your agency or another, Countess, when the Cathedral bell rouses the city to the King’s death, and the people wait in the Place for their new King to come out on the balcony, he will not come.”

The Countess was not entirely bad. Standing swaying and white-faced before the tribunal, she saw suddenly the golden head of the little Crown Prince, saw him smiling as he had smiled that day in the sunlight, saw him troubled and forlorn as he had been when, that very evening, he had left them to go to his lonely rooms. Perhaps she reached the biggest moment of her life then, when she folded her arms and stared proudly at the shrouded figures before her.

“I will not do it,” she said.

Then indeed the tribunal stirred, and sat forward. Perhaps never before had it been defied.

“I will not,” repeated the Countess.

But Number Seven remained impassive. “A new idea, Countess!” he said suavely. “I can understand that your heart recoils. But this thing is inevitable, as I have said. Whether you or another but perhaps with time to think you may come to another conclusion. We make no threats. Our position is, however, one of responsibility. We are compelled to place the future of the Republic before every other consideration.”

“That is a threat.”

“We remember both our friends and our enemies, madame. And we have only friends and enemies. There is no middle course. If you would like time to think it over—”

“How much time?” She clutched at the words.

With time all things were possible. The King might die soon, that night, the next day. Better than any one, save his daughter Annunciata and the physicians, she knew his condition. The Revolutionists might boast, but they were not all the people. Once let the boy be crowned, and it would take more than these posing plotters in their theatrical setting to overthrow him.

“How much time may I have?”

“Women vary,” said Number Seven mockingly. “Some determine quickly. Others—”

“May I have a month?”

“During which the King may die! Alas, madame, it is now you who do us too little honor!”

“A week?” begged the Countess desperately.

The leader glanced along the line. One head after another nodded slowly.

“A week it is, madame. Comrade Five!”

The one who had brought her came forward with the bandage.

“At the end of one week, madame, a fiacre will, as to-night, be waiting in the Street of the Wise Virgins.”

“And these papers?”

“On the day the Republic of Livonia is established, madame, they will be returned to you.”

He bowed, and returned to his chair. Save for the movements of the man who placed the bandage over her eyes; there was absolute silence in the room.

Prince Ferdinand William Otto was supremely happy. Three quite delightful things had happened. First, Nikky had returned. He said he felt perfectly well, but the Crown Prince thought he looked as though he had been ill, and glanced frequently at Nikky’s cigarette during the riding-hour. Second, Hedwig did not come to the riding-lesson, and he had Nikky to himself. Third, he, Prince Ferdinand William Otto, was on the eve of a birthday.

This last, however, was not unmixed happiness. For the one day the sentence of exile was to be removed so that he might lunch with the King, and he was to have strawberry jam with his tea, some that Miss Braithwaite’s sister had sent from England. But to offset all this, he was to receive a delegation of citizens.

He had been well drilled for it. As a matter of fact, on the morning of Nikky’s return, they took a few minutes to go over the ceremony, Nikky being the delegation. The way they did it was simple.

Nikky went out into the corridor, and became the Chamberlain. He stepped inside, bowed, and announced: “The delegation from the city, Highness,” standing very stiff, and a trifle bowlegged, as the Chamberlain was. Then he bowed again, and waddled out—the Chamberlain was fat—and became the delegation.

This time he tried to look like a number of people, and was not so successful. But he looked nervous, as delegations always do when they visit a Royal Highness. He bowed inside the door, and then came forward and bowed again.

“I am, of course, standing in a row,” said Nikky, sotto voce. “Now, what comes next?”

“I am to shake hands with every one.”

So they shook hands nine times, because there were to be nine members of the delegation. And Nikky picked up a brass inkwell from the desk and held it out before him.

“Your Highness,” he said, after clearing his throat, for all the world as Prince Ferdinand William Otto had heard it done frequently at cornerstones and openings of hospitals, “Your Highness—we are here to-day to felicitate Your Highness on reaching the mature age of ten. In testimonial of our—our affection and—er loyalty, we bring to you a casket of gold, containing the congratulations of the city, which we beg that Your Highness may see fit to accept. It will be of no earthly use to you, and will have to be stuck away in a vault and locked up. But it is the custom on these occasions, and far be it from us to give you a decent present that you can use or enjoy!”

Prince Ferdinand William Otto had to cover his mouth with his hand to preserve the necessary dignity. He stepped forward and took the ink-well. “I thank you very much. Please give my thanks to all the people. I am very grateful. It is beautiful. Thank you.”

Whereupon he placed the ink-well on the desk, and he and Nikky again shook hands nine times, counting, to be sure it was right. Then Nikky backed to the door, getting all tangled up in his sword, bowed again and retired.

When he reentered, the boy’s face was glowing.

“Gee!” he said, remembering this favorite word of the American boy’s. “It’s splendid to have you back again, Nikky. You’re going to stay now, aren’t you?”

“I am.” Nikky’s voice was fervent.

“Where did you go when you went away?”

“I took a short and foolish excursion, Highness. You see, while I look grown-up I dare say I am really not. Not quite, anyhow. And now and then, like other small boys I have heard of, I—well, I run away. And am sorry afterward, of course.”

Miss Braithwaite was not in the study. The Prince looked about, and drew close—to Nikky. “Did you, really?”

“I did. Some day, when you are older, I’ll tell you about it. I—has the Princess Hedwig been having tea with you, as usual?”

Carelessly spoken as it was, there was a change in Nikky’s voice. And the Crown Prince was sensitive to voices. Something similar happened to Monsieur Puaux, the French tutor, when he mentioned Hedwig.

“Not yesterday. We went to the fortress. Nikky, what is it to be in love?”

Nikky looked startled, “Well,” he said reflectively, “it’s to like some one, a lady in your case or mine, of course; to—to like them very much, and want to see them often.”

“Is that all?”

“It’s enough, sometimes. But it’s more than that. It’s being dreadfully unhappy if the other person isn’t around, for one thing. It isn’t really a rational condition. People in love do mad things quite often.”

“I know some one who is in love with Hedwig.”

Nikky looked extremely conscious. There was, too, something the Crown Prince was too small to see, something bitter and hard in his eyes. “Probably a great many are,” he said. “But I’m not sure she would care to have us discuss it.”

“It is my French tutor.”

Nikky laughed suddenly, and flung the boy to his shoulder. “Of course he is!” he cried gayly. “And you are, and the Chancellor. And I am, of course.” He stood the boy on the desk.

“Do you think she is in love, with you?” demanded the Crown Prince, very seriously.

“Not a bit of it, young man!”

“But I think she is,” he persisted. “She’s always around when you are.”

“Not this morning.”

“But she is, when she can be. She never used to take riding-lessons. She doesn’t need them.” This was a grievance, but he passed it over. “And she always asks where you are. And yesterday, when you were away, she looked very sad.”

Nikky stood with his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and stared out through the window. If it were so, if this child, with his uncanny sensitiveness, had hit on the truth! If Hedwig felt even a fraction of what he felt, what a tragedy it all was!

He forced himself to smile, however. “If she only likes me just a little,” he said lightly, “it is more than I dare to hope, or deserve. Come, now, we have spent too much time over love and delegations. Suppose we go and ride.”

But on the way across the Place Prince Ferdinand William Otto resumed the subject for a moment. “If you would marry Hedwig,” he suggested, an anxious thrill in his voice, “you would live at the Palace always, wouldn’t you? And never have to go back to your regiment?” For the bugaboo of losing Nikky to his regiment was always in the back of his small head.