chair."

There was a brief silence, then the Spaniard uttered a low exclamation
of satisfaction. Benton glanced up to see a young man of frank face,
blond mustache and Paris clothes drop into the vacant place with evident
apologies for his tardiness.

"Ah," breathed Blanco again, "I feared it would be someone I did not
know. He is the _Teniente_ Lapas, of Karyl's Palace guard. The
_pobrecito_! I wonder what post he hopes to adorn at the Court of the
Pretender."

For a moment the Spaniard looked on with an expression of melancholy
reflection. "That boy," he said "at last, has the trust and friendship
of the King. Before him lies every prospect of advancement, yet he has
been beguiled by the Countess Astaride, and throws himself into a plot
against Karyl. It is pitiable when one is perfidious so young--and with
such small cause."

"Who is the Countess Astaride?" inquired the American.

"One of the most beautiful women in Europe, to whom these children are
playthings. For her there is only Louis Delgado. It is her firing of his
dreams which makes him aspire to a throne. It is she who has the
determination. He can see visions of power only in the colors of his
absinthe glass. She uses men to her ends. Lapas is the latest--unless--"
Blanco paused--"unless he is playing two parts, and really serves Karyl.
Come, _Senor_, there is nothing further to interest us here."

CHAPTER XI

THE PASSING PRINCESS AND THE MISTAKEN COUNTESS

With the sapphire bay of Puntal at his back, his knees clasped between
interlacing fingers, Benton sat on the stone sea-wall and affected to
whistle up a lightness of heart. Near at hand sprawled a picturesque
city, its houses tinted in pea-greens, pinks and soft blues, or as white
and decorative as though fashioned in icing on a cake.

Clinging steeply to higher levels and leaning on buttressing walls, lay
outspread vineyards and cane fields and gardens. Splotching the whole
with imperial and gorgeous purple, hung masses of bougonvillea between
trellis and masonry. At a more lofty line, where the sub-tropical
profusion halted in the warning breath of a keener atmosphere, came the
scrub growth and beyond that, in succeeding altitudes, the pine belt,
the snow line and the film of trailing cloud on the white peaks.

Out of the center of the color-splashed town rose the square tower of
the ancient cathedral, white in a coat of plaster for two-thirds of its
height, but gray at its top in