r arguments. She would need them, for she knew--none
better--how great a handicap was hers. She loved Karl, and he knew it.
What had been her strength had become her weakness.

Yet she was composed enough when, before the sun was well up, the
machine drew up in the village before the inn where Mettlich had spent
his uneasy hours.

Her heavy veils aroused the curiosity of the landlord. When, shortly
after, his daughter brought down a letter to be sent at once to the
royal hunting-lodge, he shrugged his shoulders. It was not the first
time a veiled woman had come to his inn under similar circumstances.
After all, great people are but human. One cannot always be a king.

The Countess breakfasted in her room. The landlord served her himself,
and narrowly inspected her. She was not so young as he had hoped,
but she was beautiful. And haughty. A very great person, he decided,
incognito.

The King was hunting, he volunteered. There were great doings at the
lodge. Perhaps Her Excellency would be proceeding there.

She eyed him stonily, and then sent him off about his business.

So all the day she ate her heart out in her bare room. Now and then the
clear sound of bugles reached her, but she saw no hunters. Karl followed
the chase late that day. It was evening before she saw the tired horses
straggling through the village streets. Her courage was oozing by that
time. What more could she say than what he already knew? Many agencies
other than hers kept him informed of the state of affairs in Livonia. A
bitter thought, this, for it showed Karl actuated by love of Hedwig, and
not by greed of power. She feared that more than she feared death.

She had expected to go to the lodge, but at nine o'clock that night
Karl came to her, knocking at the door of her room and entering without
waiting for permission.

The room was small and cozy with firelight. Her scarlet cloak, flung
over a chair, made a dash of brilliant color. Two lighted candles on a
high carved chest, and between them a plaster figure of the Mother and
Child, a built-in bed with white curtains--that was the room.

Before the open fire Olga Loschek sat in her low chair. She wore still
her dark traveling dress; and a veil, ready to be donned at the summons
of a message from Karl, trailed across her knee. In the firelight she
looked very young--young and weary. Karl, who had come hardened to a
scene, found her appealing, almost pathetic.

She rose at his entrance a