He
knows but little, or he would not ask Her Highness--" He stopped.

"He would not ask her what?"

"To wed the man who caused all this trouble."

"What! Prince Ernst?"

"Yes. I prayed to God, Herr, that your friend's bullet would carry
death. But it was not to be."

"I am going back to London," said I. "When I have settled up my
affairs there I shall return."

"And then?"

"Perhaps I shall complete what my friend began."

I climbed into the ramshackle conveyance and was driven away. Once I
looked back. The innkeeper could be seen on the porch, then he became
lost to view behind the trees. Far away to my left the stones in the
little cemetery on the hillside shone with brilliant whiteness.

CHAPTER XVI

There were intervals during the three months which followed when I
believed that I was walking in a dream, and waking would find me
grubbing at my desk in New York. It was so unreal for these days;
mosaic romance in the heart of prosaic fact! Was there ever the like?
It was real enough, however, in the daytime, when the roar of London
hammered at my ears, but when I sat alone in my room it assumed the
hazy garments of a dream. Sometimes I caught myself listening for
Hillars: a footstep in the corridor, and I would take my pipe from my
mouth and wait expectantly. But the door never opened and the
footsteps always passed on. Often in my dreams I stood by the river
again. There is solace in these deep, wide streams. We come and go,
our hopes, our loves, our ambitions. Nature alone remains. Should I
ever behold Gretchen again? Perhaps. Yet, there was no thrill at the
thought. If ever I beheld her again it would be when she was placed
beyond the glance of my eye, the touch of my hand. She was mine, aye,
as a dream might be; something I possessed but could not hold. Heigho!
the faces that peer at us from the firelight shadows! They troop along
in a ghostly cavalcade, and the winds that creep over the window sill
and under the door--who can say that they are not the echoes of voices
we once heard in the past?

I was often on the verge of sending in my resignation, but I would
remember in time that work meant bread and butter--and forgetfulness.
When I returned to the office few questions were asked, though my
assistant looked many of them reproachfully. I told him that Hillars
had died abroad, and that he had been buried on the continent at his
request; all of which was the truth, b