Strong fingers and a fruit knife quickly extracted the painting from its frame and loosened the canvas from its stretcher, proving that the latter held in fact two canvases instead of one.  Between these had been secreted several sheets of notepaper of two kinds, stamped with two crests, all black with closely penned handwriting.

Lanyard gathered them into a sheaf and scanned them cursorily, even with distaste.  True enough, it might be argued that he had bought and paid for the right to pry into the secrets they betrayed; but it was not a right he enjoyed exercising.  A fairly thoroughgoing state of sophistication, together with some innate instincts of delicacy, worked to render him to a degree immune to such gratification as others might derive from being made privy to an exotic affair of the heart.  Revelation of human weakness was no special treat to him.  And if his eyebrows mounted as he read, if the corners of his mouth drew down, if once and again he uttered an “Oh! oh!” of shocked expostulation, he was (like most of us, incurably an actor in private as well as in public life) merely running through business which convention has designated as appropriate to such circumstances.  At bottom he was being stimulated to thought more than to derision.

Putting the letters aside, he bowed his head upon a hand and reflected sagely that love was the very deuce.

He wondered if he could or ever would love or be loved so madly.

He rather hoped not ...

Here, if you please, was the scion of a reigning royal family risking as pretty a scandal as one could well imagine—­and all for love!  Given a few more days of life, and he would have jeopardized his right of succession and set half-a-dozen European chancelleries by the ears—­and all for love!  But for his untimely end, that poor, pretty creature would have joined her life to his, consummating at one stroke her freedom from the intolerable conditions of existence with Victor and a diplomatic convulsion which might only too easily have precipitated all Europe into a great war—­and all for lawless love!

So once more in history Death had served well the interests of public morality.

After a year these letters alone survived ...

How they had survived, what hands had collected and secreted them, and for what purpose, intrigued the imagination no end.  Lanyard inclined to credit Princess Sofia with the indiscretion of saving these souvenirs of a grande passion that had almost made history.  There was the sentimental motive to account for such action, and another:  the satisfaction of knowing she had concrete proof of her intention to treat Victor as he had treated her.

Then somehow the painting must have passed out of her possession; and in all likelihood she had made frantic and awkward efforts to regain it which had aroused the suspicions of Victor; with the sequel of that afternoon....