Mowbray comparatively a nobody. The humble connection
had expressed herself as unspeakably grateful, and the two had kept
up a friendship ever since. Therefore, when the difficulty of realism
in a name presented itself, the Grand Duchess thought of Lady Mowbray
and Miss Helen Mowbray. They were about to leave England for India,
but had not yet left; and the widow of the Baron was flattered as well
as amused by the romantic confidence reposed in her by the widow of
the Grand Duke. She was delighted to lend her name, and her daughter's
name; and who could blame the lady if her mind rushed forward to the
time when she should have earned gratitude from the young Empress of
Rhaetia? for of course she had no doubt of the way in which the
adventure would end.

As for the wife of the late British Ambassador to the Rhaetian Court,
she was not sentimental and therefore was not quite as comfortably
sure of the sequel. As far as concerned her own part in the plot,
however, she felt safe enough; for though she was, after a fashion,
deceiving her old acquaintances at Kronburg, she was not foisting
adventuresses upon them; on the contrary, she was giving them a chance
of entertaining angels unawares, by sending them letters to ladies who
were in reality the Grand Duchess of Baumenburg-Drippe and the
Princess Virginia.

The four mysterious gentlemen left Alleheiligen the day after
Virginia's encounter with the chamois hunter; but the Mowbrays
lingered on. The adventure had begun so gloriously that the girl
feared an anti-climax for the next step. Though she longed for the
second meeting, she dreaded it as well, and put off the chance of it
from day to day. The stay of the Mowbrays at Alleheiligen lengthened
into a week, and when they left at last, it was only just in time for
the great festivities at Kronburg, which were to celebrate the
Emperor's thirty-first birthday, an event enhanced in national
importance by the fact that the eighth anniversary of his coronation
would fall on the same date.

On the morning of the journey, the Grand Duchess had neuralgia and was
frankly cross.

"I don't see after all, what you've accomplished so far by this mad
freak which has dragged us across Europe," she said, fretfully, in the
train which they had taken at a town twenty miles from Alleheiligen.
"We've perched on a mountain top, like the Ark on Ararat, for a week,
freezing; the adventure you had there is only a complication. What
have we