"It is hardly that, is it? I love you."

"I wonder how much you love me."

Karl smiled. He was on his own ground here. The girlish question put him at ease. "Enough for us both, at first," he said. "After that--"

"But," said Hedwig desperately, "suppose I know I shall never care for you, the way you will want me to. You talk of being fair. I want to be fair to you. You have a right--" She checked herself abruptly. After all, he might have a right to know about Nikky Larisch. But there were others who had rights, too--Otto to his throne, her mother and Hilda and all the others, to safety, her grandfather to die in peace, the only gift she could give him.

"What I think you want to tell me, is something I already know," Karl said gravely. "Suppose I am willing to take that chance? Suppose I am vain enough, or fool enough, to think that I can make you forget certain things, certain people. What then?"

"I do not forget easily."

"But you would try?"

"I would try," said Hedwig, almost in a whisper.

Karl bent over and taking her hands, raised her to her feet.

"Darling," he said, and suddenly drew her to him. He covered her with hot kisses, her neck, her face, the soft angle below her ear. Then he held her away from him triumphantly. "Now," he said, "have you forgotten?"

But Hedwig, scarlet with shame, faced him steadily. "No," she said.

Later in the evening the old King received a present, a rather wilted rose, to which was pinned a card with "Best wishes from Ferdinand William Otto" printed on it in careful letters.

It was the only flower the King had received during his illness.

When, that night, he fell asleep, it was still clasped in his old hand, and there was a look of grim tenderness on the face on the pillow, turned toward his dead son's picture.

CHAPTER XXXI. LET METTLICH GUARD HIS TREASURE

Troubled times now, with the Carnival only a day or two off, and the shop windows gay with banners; with the press under the house of the concierge running day and night, and turning out vast quantities of flaming bulletins printed in red; with the Committee of Ten in almost constant session, and Olga Loschek summoned before it, to be told of the passage, and the thing she was to do; with the old King very close to the open door, and Hedwig being fitted for her bridal robe and for somber black at one fitting.

Troubled times, indeed. The city was smouldering, and from some strange source had come a new rumor. Nothing less than that the Royalists, headed by the Chancellor, despairing of crowning the boy Prince, would, on the King's death, make away with him, thus putting Hedwig on the throne Hedwig, Queen of Karnia perhaps already by secret marriage.

The city, which adored the boy, was seething. The rumor had originated with Olga Loschek, who had given it to the Committee as a useful weapon.

Thus would she have her revenge on those of the Palace, and at the same time secure her own safety. Revenge, indeed, for she knew the way of such rumors, how they fly from house to house, street to street. How the innocent, proclaiming their innocence, look even the more guilty.

When she had placed the scheme before the Committee of Ten, had seen the eagerness with which they grasped it--"In this way," she had said, in her scornful, incisive tones, "the onus of the boy is not on you, but on them. Even those who have no sympathy with your movement will burn at such a rumor. The better the citizen, the more a lover of home and order, the more outraged he will be. Every man in the city with a child of his own will rise against the Palace."

"Madame," the leader had said, "you should be of the Committee."

But she had ignored the speech contemptuously, and gone on to other things.

Now everything was arranged. Black Humbert had put his niece to work on a Carnival dress for a small boy, and had stayed her curiosity by a hint that it was for the American lad.

"They are comfortable tenants," he had said. "Not lavish, perhaps, as rich Americans should be, but orderly, and pleasant. The boy has good manners. It would be well to please him."

So the niece, sewing in the back room, watched Bobby in and out, with pleasant mysteries in her eyes, and sewing sang the song the cathedral chimed:

"Draw me also, Mary mild, To adore Thee and thy Child!

Mary mild, Star in desert drear and wild."

So she sang, and sewed, and measured Bobby's height as he passed by the wainscoting in the passage, and cunningly cut a pattern.

"So high," she reflected, humming, "is his shoulder. And so, to this panel, should go the little trousers. 'Star in desert drear and wild.'"

Now and then, in the evenings, when the Americans were away, and Bobby was snug in bed, with Tucker on the tiny feather comfort at his feet, the Fraulein would come downstairs and sit in Black Humbert's room. At such times the niece would be sent on an errand, and the two would talk.

The niece, who, although she had no lover, was on the lookout for love, suspected a romance of the middle-aged, and smiled in the half-darkness of the street; smiled with a touch of malice, as one who has pierced the armor of the fortress, and knows its weakness.

But it was not of love that Humbert and the Fraulein talked.

Herman Spier was busy in those days and making plans. Thus, day by day, he dined in the restaurant where the little Marie, now weary of her husband, sat in idle intervals behind the cashier's desk, and watched the grass in the Place emerge from its winter hiding place. When she turned her eyes to the room, frequently she encountered those of Herman Spier, pale yet burning, fixed on her. And at last, one day when her husband lay lame with sciatica, she left the desk and paused by Herman's table.

"You come frequently now," she observed. "It is that you like us here, or that you have risen in the shop?"

"I have left the shop," said Herman, staring at her. Flesh, in a moderate amount, suited her well. He liked plump women. They were, if you please, an armful. "And I come to see you."

"Left the shop!" Marie exclaimed. "And Peter Niburg--he has left also? I never see him."

"No," said Herman non-committally.

"He is ill, perhaps?"

"He is dead," said Herman, devouring her with his eyes.

"Dead!" She put a hand to her plump side.

"Aye. Shot as a spy." He took another piece of the excellent pigeon pie.

Marie, meantime, lost all her looks, grew pasty white.

"Of the--the Terrorists?" she demanded, in a whisper.

"Terrorists! No. Of Karnia. He was no patriot."

So the little Marie went back to her desk, and to her staring out over the Place in intervals of business. And what she thought of no one can know. But that night, and thereafter, she was very tender to her spouse, and put cloths soaked in hot turpentine water on his aching thigh.

On the surface things went on as usual at the Palace. Karl's visit had been but for a day or two. He had met the Council in session, and had had, because of their growing alarm, rather his own way with them.

But although he had pointed to the King's condition and theirs--as an argument for immediate marriage--he failed. The thing would be done, but properly and in good time. They had a signed agreement to fall back upon, and were in no hurry to pay his price. Karl left them in a bad temper, well concealed, and had the pleasure of being hissed through the streets.

But he comforted himself with the thought of Hedwig. He had taken her in his arms before he left, and she had made no resistance. She had even, in view of all that was at stake, made a desperate effort to return his kiss, and found herself trembling afterward.

In two weeks he was to return to her, and he whispered that to her.

On the day after the dinner-party Otto went to a hospital with Miss Braithwaite. It was the custom of the Palace to send the flowers from its spectacular functions to the hospitals, and the Crown Prince delighted in these errands.