"

"Everything. The prince can advance him in certain ways. My father plays
for high stakes."

"Are you sure you don't want to be a princess?" The voice seemed to coax
her. "Even if you do want it very much," it seemed to say, "why not
relinquish it and stay here under the tree?"

"No," she said, "I don't want to be a princess, even if I could be. And
I don't want anything my father can offer me, or buy for me, or steal
for me."

"Then, playmate, when he comes back, you'll have to stand up to him
or--cut."

At that moment he saw before him the imagined picture of her face with
the tears upon it.

"It isn't easy," she was saying. "If you knew my father, you would see.
You can't withstand him, he looks so kind. You can't refuse him, because
he seems to want nothing but your good. You can't say you won't have a
splendid time with him, because you simply have it."

"Are you sure he is so bad?"

"I am sure," she answered gravely. "He is very bad. And it is not
because he wills to be bad. It is because he wills to have power, and as
if he were better fitted to have power than almost anybody--except that
he is not good. Why, do you know what power he has? He wears a ring, the
seal of the Brotherhood. Whatever order is stamped with that seal is
carried out, even if it is thousands of miles away. When Ivan Gorof
died"--she stopped, shuddering.

"What was that?"

"I can't tell you. It is too dreadful. He withstood my father. And when
he was found, they picked up in the chamber a bit of red wax on a shred
of paper--there was nothing else--but I know and we all know it was a
part of the seal that held the warrant they read to him--the
assassins--before he died."

"Did your father sentence him to death?"

"Who else? Sometimes I get thinking about it at night, and then it seems
to me as if all the people in the world had been delivered into his
hand. That is because I know I have grown to be afraid of him."

"Was he always cruel to you?"

"Oh, never! never in the world! When I was little, I traveled about with
him, and I had the best time a child ever had. I was feted, and carried
on shoulders, and made much of because I was his daughter. Then I grew
up and it all--changed." Her voice fell. She remembered the snare of the
fowler, but that she could not tell him.

"Is he unkind to you now?"

"Never! it is unbroken kindness,--a benevolence, shall I call it? But it
terrifies me. For under it all is that unbending w