toy trumpets; and all were shouting and cheering with a deafening enthusiasm.  The news of the Princess’s arrival had spread like wildfire through the town.  Wogan’s spirits rose at a bound.  Here was a welcome very different from the Cardinal’s.  Wogan rejoiced in the good sense of the citizens of Bologna who could appreciate the great qualities of his chosen woman.  Their enthusiasm did them credit; he could have embraced them one by one.

He strove to push his way towards the door, but he would hardly have pierced through that throng had not a man by the light of a torch recognised him and bawled out his name.  He was lifted shoulder high in a second; he was passed from hand to hand over the heads of the people; he was set tenderly down in the very doorway of the Pilgrim Inn, and he found Clementina at the window of an unlighted room gazing unperceived at the throng.

“Here’s a true welcome, madam,” said he, cordially, with his thoughts away upon that bluff of hillside where the acclamations had seemed so distant and unreal.  It is possible that they seemed of small account to Clementina now, for though they rang in ears and were visible to her eyes, she sat quite unmoved by them.

“This is one tiny square in a little town,” he continued.  “But its shouts will ring across Europe;” and she turned her head to him and said quietly,—­

“The King is still in Spain, is he not?”

Wogan’s enthusiasm was quenched in alarm.  Her voice had rung, for all its quietude, with pride.  What if she guessed what he for one would not let his wildest fancy dwell upon?  Wogan repeated to himself the resolve which he had made, though with an alteration.  “The King must marry the Princess,” he had said; now he said, “The Princess must marry the King.”

He began hurriedly to assure her that the King had doubted his capacity to bring the enterprise to a favourable issue, but that now he would without doubt return.  Cardinal Origo would tell her more upon that head if she would be good enough to receive him at ten in the morning; and while Wogan was yet speaking, a torch waved, and amongst that close-pressed throng of faces below him in the street, one sprang to his view with a remarkable distinctness, a face most menacing and vindictive.  It was the face of Harry Whittington.  Just for a second it shone out, angles and lines so clearly revealed that it was as though the crowd had vanished, and that one contorted face glared alone at the windows in a flare of hell-fire.

Clementina saw the face too, for she drew back instinctively within the curtains of the window.

“The man at Peri,” said she, in a whisper.

“Your Highness will pardon me,” exclaimed Wogan, and he made a movement towards the door.  Then he stopped, hesitated for a second, and came back.  He had a question to put, as difficult perhaps as ever lips had to frame.

“At Peri,” he said in a stumbling voice, “I waked from a dream and saw that man, bird-like and cunning, watching over the rim of the stairs.  I was dreaming that a star out of heaven stooped towards me, that a woman’s face shone out of the star’s bright heart, that her lips deigned to bend downwards to my earth.  And I wonder, I wonder whether those cunning eyes had cunning enough to interpret my dream.”