“Your father, Suzanne?” he said.  “I have not heard of him.  Is he here?”

“They left him a prisoner at Munich.  Doubtless he will escape and he, too, will reach Zillenstein.”

“Tell Mademoiselle Julie that her brother did not come to the appointed meeting at Chastel, because he was wounded.  Not badly.  Don’t be alarmed, Suzanne.  He’ll be as well as ever soon.”

“Then he, too, will come to Zillenstein.  You are not the only one who seeks, Monsieur Scott.”

“But I am the first to arrive.  Nothing can take that from me.”

“It is true.  Now I must hasten back to the castle.  If I stay longer they will suspect me.”

She slipped from the shrubbery and was gone, and, John, afire with new emotions, strolled in a wide circuit back to the stables.

A week went by.  Twice every day he saw Julie on the terrace, but no word passed between them, the chance never came.  But the hosts of the air were at work.  The invisible currents were passing between the girl on the terrace who was treated like a princess and the young peasant who walked the horses in the road.

“Be not afraid.  I have a strength more than my own to save you,” came on a wave of air.

“I fear not for myself, only for you lest they discover you,” came the answering wave.

“I love you.  You are the most beautiful woman in the world and the bravest.  It’s cause for pride to risk death for you.”

“I know that you are here for me.  I knew that you would come, when I saw you in Metz.  I know that under your peasant’s garb you are a prince, more of a real prince than any Auersperg that ever lived.”

John was outside of himself.  He felt sometimes as if he had left his body behind.  The spirit of the crusader was still upon him, and in sight of his beloved, the prize that he had reached but not yet won, he cast aside all thought of danger or failure and awaited the event, whatever it might be, with the supreme confidence of youth.  It is but truth to say that he was happy in those days, filled with a stolen delight, all the sweeter because it was stolen under the very eyes of the medieval baron, lord almost of life and death, who was master there.

He steadily advanced in the good graces of Walther.  No other such industrious and skillful groom had appeared at Zillenstein in many a day, and he rapidly acquired dexterity also with the automobiles.  None could send them spinning with more certainty along the curving mountain roads.  He practiced with diligence because he had a vague premonition that all this knowledge would be of use to him some day.

Pappenheim went away, but returned after four days.  John fancied that he had been in Vienna, but he knew the magnet that had brought him back.  He saw the young Austrian’s eyes flame more than once when Julie appeared in her favorite place on the terrace.  And yet John neither hated nor feared him.