“And the saying lived in your thoughts,” cried Clementina.  “I do not wonder.  ‘Without passion there can be no great thing!’ Can books teach a man so much?”

“Nay, it was an hour’s talk with Koenigsmarck which set the old man’s thoughts that way; and though Koenigsmarck talked never so well, I would not likely infer from his talk an eternal and universal truth.  Count Otto left me alone while he fetched me food, and he left me in a panic.”

“A panic?” said Clementina, with a little laugh.  “You!”

“Yes.  That first mistake of me for Koenigsmarck, that insistence that my case was Koenigsmarck’s—­”

“There was a shadow of truth in it—­even then?” said Clementina, suddenly leaning across the table towards him.  Wogan strove not to see the light of her joy suddenly sparkling in her eyes.

“I sat alone, feeling the ghost of Koenigsmarck in the room with me,” he resumed quickly, and his voice dropped, and he looked round the little cabin.  Clementina looked round quickly too.  Then their eyes met again.  “I heard his voice menacing me.  ’For love of a queen I lived.  For love of a queen I died most horribly; and it would have gone better with the queen had she died the same death at the same time—­’” And Clementina interrupted him with a cry which was fierce.

“Ah, who can say that, and know it for the truth—­except the Queen?  You must ask her in her prison at Ahlden, and that you cannot do.  She has her memories maybe.  Maybe she has built herself within these thirty years a world of thought so real, it makes her gaolers shadows, and that prison a place of no account, save that it gives her solitude and is so more desirable than a palace.  I can imagine it;” and then she stopped, and her voice dropped to the low tone which Wogan had used.

“You looked round you but now and most fearfully.  Is Koenigsmarck’s spirit here?”

“No,” exclaimed Wogan; “I would to God it were!  I would I felt its memories chilling me as they chilled me that night!  But I cannot.  I cannot as much as hear a whisper.  All the heavens are dumb,” he cried.

“And the earth waits,” said Clementina.

She did not move, neither did Wogan.  They both sat still as statues.  They had come to the great crisis of their destiny.  A change of posture, a gesture, an assumed expression which might avert the small, the merely awkward indiscretions of the tongue, they both knew to be futile.  It was in the mind of each of them that somehow without their participation the truth would out that night; for the dawn was so long in coming.

“All the way up from Peri,” said Wogan, suddenly, “I strove to make real to myself the ignominy, the odium, the scandal.”

“But you could not,” said Clementina, with a nod of comprehension, as though that inability was a thing familiar to her.

“When I reached the hut, and saw that fan of light spreading from the window, as it spread over the lawn beyond Stuttgart, I remembered Otto von Ahlen and his talk of Koenigsmarck.  I tried to hear the menaces.”