rincess!' they cried. 'The Princess is coming!'

And even as they spoke I saw her in front of us, her sweet face framed
in the darkness. I had cause to hate her, for she had cheated and
befooled me, and yet it thrilled me then and thrills me now to think
that my arms have embraced her, and that I have felt the scent of her
hair in my nostrils. I know not whether she lies under her German earth,
or whether she still lingers, a grey-haired woman in her Castle of Hof,
but she lives ever, young and lovely, in the heart and memory of Etienne
Gerard.

'For shame!' she cried, sweeping up to me, and tearing with her own
hands the noose from my neck. 'You are fighting in God's own quarrel,
and yet you would begin with such a devil's deed as this. This man is
mine, and he who touches a hair of his head will answer for it to me.'

They were glad enough to slink off into the darkness before those
scornful eyes. Then she turned once more to me.

'You can follow me, Colonel Gerard,' she said. 'I have a word that I
would speak to you.'

I walked behind her to the chamber into which I had originally been
shown. She closed the door, and then looked at me with the archest
twinkle in her eyes.

'Is it not confiding of me to trust myself with you?' said she. 'You
will remember that it is the Princess of Saxe-Felstein and not the poor
Countess Palotta of Poland.'

'Be the name what it might,' I answered, 'I helped a lady whom I
believed to be in distress, and I have been robbed of my papers and
almost of my honour as a reward.'

'Colonel Gerard,' said she, 'we have been playing a game, you and I, and
the stake was a heavy one. You have shown by delivering a message which
was never given to you that you would stand at nothing in the cause of
your country. My heart is German and yours is French, and I also would
go all lengths, even to deceit and to theft, if at this crisis I could
help my suffering fatherland. You see how frank I am.'

'You tell me nothing that I have not seen.'

'But now that the game is played and won, why should we bear malice? I
will say this, that if ever I were in such a plight as that which I
pretended in the inn of Lobenstein, I should never wish to meet a more
gallant protector or a truer-hearted gentleman than Colonel Etienne
Gerard. I had never thought that I could feel for a Frenchman as I felt
for you when I slipped the papers from your breast.'

'But you took them, none the less.'

'They were nec