back to his own little
place over the stables where he passed a night that was all but
sleepless thinking over his problem and finding no good solution. He
meant to follow Julie and Suzanne in any event to the hunting lodge, but
it was not sufficient merely to follow. He must appear in some capacity
that would permit him to be of service. And yet Providence was working
for him at that moment.

Prince Karl of Auersperg in his magnificent modernized apartments in the
huge castle was also troubled by an inability to sleep. Hitherto in his
fifty or more years of life he had always got what he wanted. His blood
was more ancient than that of either Hohenzollern or Hapsburg. The
Auerspergs had been princes of the Holy Roman Empire for a thousand
years and now he was a prince of both Teutonic empires and a general of
the first rank in the army of Germany. His wealth was so vast that he
scarcely knew the extent of his own lands and here in Zillenstein he
could maintain the power and state that appertained to a baron of the
Middle Ages.

A mind that has only to wish for a thing to get it becomes closed in
fifty years. It mistakes desire for right. It regards opposition as
sacrilege. Other minds that differ from it are wicked because they
differ. The thick armor of Prince Karl's self-complacency had been
pierced as it were by a tiny needle that stung, however tiny, as if its
point were laden with poison.

He, the omniscient and omnipotent, had been defied and by whom? A mere
slip of a girl! A child! She was not even of his own race! But perhaps
it was this very defiance that made him wish for her all the more. He
loved her as he had never loved that long-dead wife, a plain princess
who always thought what she was told to think.

But he would take Julie in all honor as his wife. He could not make her
a princess but he could make her a countess, and he would clothe her in
a golden shower. There had been hundreds of morganatic marriages. They
implied no disgrace. Noblewomen themselves had been glad to make them.
And yet she had refused. Nothing could move her. She had not even
flinched a particle when he had threatened her otherwise with death as a
spy, although the threat was merely words on his lips and had no abiding
place in his heart. She was most beautiful then, when the defiant fire
flashed in her dark blue eyes and the sunshine coming through a tall
stained glass window made deep red tints in her wonderful golden hair.
I