The Countess was thrust into her bed at noon of a Monday in October.  At three the Grand Duke started for East Prussia, incognito in a motor—­you know the difficulty news has in reaching persons in motors.  At four one of Priscilla’s maids, an obscure damsel who had been at the mercy of the others and was chosen because she hated them, tripped out of the castle with shining eyes and pockets heavy with bribes, and caused herself to be whisked away by the afternoon express to Cologne.  At six, just as the castle guard was being relieved, two persons led their bicycles through the archway and down across the bridge.  It was dark, and nobody recognized them.  Fritzing was got up sportingly, almost waggishly—­heaven knows his soul was not feeling waggish—­as differently as possible from his usual sober clothes.  Somehow he reminded Priscilla of a circus, and she found it extremely hard not to laugh.  On his head he had a cap with ear-pieces that hid his grey hair; round his neck a gaudy handkerchief muffled well about his face; immense goggles cloaked the familiar overhanging eyebrows and deep-set eyes, goggles curiously at variance with the dapper briskness of his gaitered legs.  The Princess was in ordinary blue serge, short and rather shabby, it having been subjected for hours daily during the past week to rough treatment by the maid now travelling to Cologne.  As for her face and hair, they were completely hidden in the swathings of a motor-veil.

The sentinels stared rather as these two figures pushed their bicycles through the gates, and undoubtedly did for some time afterwards wonder who they could have been.  The same thing happened down below on the bridge; but once over that and in the town all they had to do was to ride straight ahead.  They were going to bicycle fifteen miles to Ruehl, a small town with a railway station on the main line between Kunitz and Cologne.  Express trains do not stop at Ruehl, but there was a slow train at eight which would get them to Gerstein, the capital of the next duchy, by midnight.  Here they would change into the Cologne express; here they would join the bribed maid; here luggage had been sent by Fritzing,—­a neat bag for himself, and a neat box for his niece.  The neat box was filled with neat garments suggested to him by the young lady in the shop in Gerstein where he had been two days before to buy them.  She told him of many other articles which, she said, no lady’s wardrobe could be considered complete without; and the distracted man, fearing the whole shop would presently be put into trunks and sent to the station to meet them, had ended by flinging down two notes for a hundred marks each and bidding her keep strictly within that limit.  The young lady became very scornful.  She told him that she had never heard of any one being clothed from head to foot inside and out, even to brushes, soap, and an umbrella, for two hundred marks.  Fritzing, in dread of conspicuous masses of luggage, yet staggered by the girl’s conviction, pulled out a third hundred mark note, but added words in his extremity of so strong and final a nature, that she, quailing, did keep within this limit, and the box was packed.  Thus Priscilla’s outfit cost almost exactly fifteen pounds.  It will readily be imagined that it was neat.