hands with every
confidence that you will restore your patient to health as quickly as
any man in Europe could do. I must leave immediately, and so I trust
everything to you. All care must be taken of him. He must want for
nothing that you can give him--except liberty."

Oscarovitch returned the doctor's assenting bow and left the room. In
half an hour the yacht was flying at full speed over the smooth waters
of the Baltic, heading a little to the south of West.

CHAPTER XXII

A TRIP ON THE SOUND

"Good morning, Dad," said Nitocris, as she entered the sitting-room
about half an hour before breakfast the next morning. "What is your
opinion of the European situation now?"

"Good morning, Niti; what is yours?" asked her father, looking at her
with grave eyes and smiling lips.

"As it was yesterday, only rather more so. In his present incarnation,
Prince Oscar Oscarovitch is, I should think, about as black-hearted a
scoundrel as ever polluted the air that honest people breathe."

"I entirely agree with you. And now, believing that, do you still
propose to trust yourself to his tender mercies on board his own yacht,
surrounded, as you will be, by men who, no doubt, are his absolute
slaves?"

"_I_ trust myself to his tender mercies, Dad?" she replied, drawing
herself up and throwing her head back a little; "you seem to have got
hold of the thing by the wrong end, as Brenda would say. That is only
what it will look like. The reality will be that he will blindly trust
himself to _my_ mercies--and I can assure you that he will find them
anything but tender. No, dear, we shall accept His Highness's invitation
to lunch, and then his offer of the hospitality of the yacht for the
trip, which, by the way, I fancy will be more to the eastward than to
the northward----"

"You mean, I suppose, Trelitz and Viborg?"

"Not Trelitz, I think, but Viborg almost certainly. That will be the end
of the abduction as far as I can see from our present plane of
existence."

"Really, Niti--well, well. Of course, I know that you will be perfectly
safe: but what would our good friends on this plane, as you put it, the
Van Huysmans, for instance, think if they could hear you talking so
calmly to your own father about getting yourself abducted by a man whom
you justly think to be one of the most unscrupulous scoundrels on earth!
And, by the way, what is to become of me in the carrying out of this
little scheme of yours? I hope you