“I think it is warmer to-night,” said Maggie, urged by a sudden necessity of speech, hampered by a sudden chill at the heart.

“Yes,” answered Etta.  And she shivered.

For a moment there was a little silence and Etta looked at the clock.  It was ten minutes to seven.

A high wind was blowing, the first of the equinoctial gales heralding the spring.  The sound of the wind in the great chimney was like the moaning of high rigging at sea.

The door opened and Steinmetz came in.  Etta’s face hardened, her lips closed with a snap.  Steinmetz looked at her and at Maggie.  For once he seemed to have no pleasantry ready for use.  He walked toward a table where some books and newspapers lay in pleasant profusion.  He was standing there when Paul came into the room.  The prince glanced at Maggie.  He saw where his wife stood, but he did not look at her.

Steinmetz was writing something on half a sheet of notepaper, in pencil.  He pushed it across the table toward Paul, who drew it nearer to him.

“Are you armed?” were the written words.

Paul crushed the paper in the hollow of his hand and threw it into the fire, where it burned away.  He also glanced at the clock.  It was five minutes to seven.

Suddenly the door was thrown open and a manservant rushed in—­pale, confused, terror-stricken.  He was a giant footman in the gorgeous livery of the Alexis.

“Excellency,” he stammered in Russian, “the castle is surrounded—­they will kill us—­they will burn us out——­”

He stopped abashed before Paul’s pointing finger and stony face.

“Leave the room!” said Paul.  “You forget yourself.”

Through the open door-way to which Paul pointed peered the ashen faces of other servants huddled together like sheep.

“Leave the room!” repeated Paul, and the man obeyed him, walking to the door unsteadily with quivering chin.  On the threshold he paused.  Paul stood pointing to the door.  He had a poise of the head—­some sudden awakening of the blood that had coursed in the veins of hereditary potentates.  Maggie looked at him; she had never known him like this.  She had known the man, she had never encountered the prince.

The big clock over the castle boomed out the hour, and at the same instant there arose a roar like the voice of the surf on a Malabar shore.  There was a crashing of glass almost in the room itself.  Already Steinmetz was drawing the curtains closer over the windows in order to prevent the light from filtering through the interstices of the closed shutters.

“Only stones,” he said to Paul, with his grim smile; “it might have been bullets.”

As if in corroboration of his suggestion the sharp ring of more than one fire-arm rang out above the dull roar of many voices.

Steinmetz crossed the room to where Etta was standing, white-lipped, by the fire.  Her clenched hand was gripping Maggie’s wrist.  She was half hidden behind her cousin.  Maggie was looking at Paul.  Etta was obviously conscious of Steinmetz’s gaze and approach.