only, of the
trio, could so exhale her soul in the very perfume of sound. For to
his fancy, it was like hearing the fragrance of a rose breathed aloud.
"I have heard an angel," he said to himself. But in reality he had
heard Princess Virginia of Baumenburg-Drippe, showing off her very
prettiest accomplishment, in the childish hope that the man she loved
might hear.

Leopold of Rhaetia had heard many golden voices--golden in more senses
of the word than one--but never before, it seemed to him, a voice
which so stirred his spirit with pain that was bitter-sweet, pleasure
as blinding as pain, and a vague yearning for something beautiful
which he had never known.

If he had been asked what that something was, he could not, if he
would, have told; for a man cannot explain that part of himself which
he has never even tried to understand.

Before he had moved many paces from the door, the lovely voice, no
longer plaintive, but swelling to brilliant triumph, broke into the
national anthem of Rhaetia--warlike, inspiring as the Marseillaise,
but wilder, calling her sons to face death singing, in the defense.

"She's an English girl, yet she sings our Rhaetian music as no
Rhaetian woman I have ever heard, can sing it," he told himself,
slowly passing on to his own door. "She is a new type to me. I don't
think there can be many like her. A pity that she is not a Princess,
or else--that Leopold the Emperor and Leo the chamois hunter are not
two men. Still, the chamois hunter of Rhaetia would be no match for
Miss Mowbray of London, so the weights would balance in the scales as
unevenly as now."

He gave a sigh, and a smile that lifted his eyebrows. Then he opened
the door of his sitting-room, to forget among certain documents which
urged the importance of an immediate return to duty, the difference
between Leopold and Leo, the difference between women and a Woman.

"Good-by to our mountains, to-morrow morning," he said to his three
chosen companions. "Hey for work and Kronburg."

_She_ was going to Kronburg in a few days, according to Frau Yorvan.
But Kronburg was not Alleheiligen; and Leopold, the Emperor, was not,
at his palace, in the way of meeting tourists--or even "explorers."

"She'll never know to whom she gave her ring," he thought with the
dense innocence of a man who has studied all books save women's looks.
"And I'll never know who gives her a plain gold one for the finger on
which she once wore this."

But in