He caught his breath; he grew white with a sudden fear; you would have thought it was his heart that was knocked upon.  For there was another side to the business.  The King would marry the Princess; but how would the Princess take this marriage by proxy and the King’s continued absence?  She had her pride, as he knew well.  The knocking was repeated.  Wogan in a voice of suspense bade his visitor enter.  The visitor was one of her Highness’s new servants.  “Without a doubt,” thought Wogan, “she has received a letter by the same messenger who brought me mine.”

The servant handed him a note from the Princess, begging him to attend on her at once.  “She must marry the King,” said Wogan to himself.  He took his hat and cane, and followed the servant into the street.

CHAPTER XXII

Wogan was guided through the streets to the mouth of a blind alley, at the bottom of which rose a high garden wall, and over the wall the smoking chimneys of a house among the tops of many trees freshly green, which shivered in the breeze and shook the sunlight from their leaves.  This alley, from the first day when the Princess came to lodge in the house, had worn to Wogan a familiar air; and this morning, as he pondered dismally whether, after all, those laborious months since he had ridden hopefully out of Bologna to Ohlau were to bear no fruit, he chanced to remember why.  He had passed that alley at the moment of grey dawn, when he was starting out upon this adventure, and he had seen a man muffled in a cloak step from its mouth and suddenly draw back as his horse’s hoofs rang in the silent street, as though to elude recognition.  Wogan wondered for a second who at that time had lived in the house; but he was admitted through a door in the wall and led into a little room with French windows opening on a lawn.  The garden seen from here was a wealth of white blossoms and yellow, and amongst them Clementina paced alone, the richest and the whitest blossom of them all.  She was dressed simply in a white gown of muslin and a little three-cornered hat of straw; but Wogan knew as he advanced towards her that it was not merely the hat which threw the dark shadow on her face.

She took a step or two towards him and began at once without any friendly greeting in a cold, formal voice,—­

“You have received a letter this morning from his Majesty?”

“Yes, your Highness.”

“Why does the King linger in Spain?”

“The expedition from Cadiz—­”

“Which left harbour a week ago.  Well, Mr. Wogan,” she asked in biting tones, “how does that expedition now on the high seas detain his Majesty in Spain?”

Wogan was utterly dumfounded.  He stood and gazed at her, a great trouble in his eyes, and his wits with that expedition all at sea.

“Is your Highness sure?” he babbled.

“Oh, indeed, most sure,” she replied with the hardest laugh which he had ever heard from a woman’s lips.