r to the little room beyond the
smoking-room in the old part of the castle.

"Well?" said Paul, with the unconscious hauteur which made him a prince
to these people.

The starosta spread out his hands.

"Your Excellency," he answered, "I am afraid."

"Of what?"

The starosta shrugged his narrow shoulders in cringing deprecation.

"Excellency, I do not know. There is something in the village--something
in the whole country. I know not what it is. It is a feeling--one cannot
see it, one cannot define it; but it is there, like the gleam of water
at the bottom of a deep well. The moujiks are getting dangerous. They
will not speak to me. I am suspected. I am watched."

His shifty eyes, like black beads, flitted from side to side as he
spoke. He was like a weasel at bay. It was the face of a man who went in
bodily fear.

"I will go with you down to the village now," said Paul. "Is there any
excuse--any illness?"

"Ah, Excellency," replied the chief, "there is always that excuse."

Paul looked at the clock.

"I will go now," he said. He began his simple preparations at once.

"There is dinner to be thought of," suggested Steinmetz, with a resigned
smile. "It is half-past seven."

"Dinner can wait," replied Paul in English. "You might tell the ladies
that I have gone out, and will dine alone when I come back."

Steinmetz shrugged his broad shoulders.

"I think you are a fool," he said, "to go alone. If they discover your
identity they will tear you to pieces."

"I am not afraid of them," replied Paul, with his head in the medicine
cupboard, "any more than I am afraid of a horse. They are like horses;
they do not know their own strength."

"With this difference," added Steinmetz, "that the moujik will one day
make the discovery. He is beginning to make it now. The starosta is
quite right, Paul. There is something in the air. It is about time that
you took the ladies away from here and left me to manage it alone."

"That time will never come again," answered Paul. "I am not going to
leave you alone again."

He was pushing his arms into the sleeves of the old brown coat reaching
to his heels, a garment which commanded as much love and respect in
Osterno as ever would an angel's wing.

Steinmetz opened the drawer of his bureau and laid a revolver on the
table.

"At all events," he said, "you may as well have the wherewithal to make
a fight of it, if the worst comes to the worst."

"As you like," answere