“No, not that, Suzanne, but they’re preparing to send her and you away.”

“And glad we both will be to leave this hateful castle of Zillenstein.”

“But it’s not that you will fare better.  There will be no chance of freedom now.  You are to be sent into the higher mountains in the wilderness to a hunting lodge belonging to Auersperg.  You will be hidden from all but a few of his most trusted followers.”

“Then we’re not afraid.  We shall even be glad to go there, anywhere from this terrible place.  We do not fear the woods, my mistress and I. I can think they’re more friendly than those old stone walls above us.”

“But tell her this, Suzanne, I pray you, that I shall follow her there.”

“How?”

“I don’t yet know, but I shall find a way.  Tell her, Suzanne, that I’ll never leave her so long as I’m alive.”

The eyes of the grim woman softened singularly, as she gazed in the dusk at the young man.  A devotion such as his, a devotion so evident, would have moved a heart of stone.  Her young mistress was dearer than anyone else in the world to her, dearer than her own father, and her stern spirit relaxed when she saw that another could love her in a different way, but as well.

“I’ll tell her,” she said, “but I tell you that ’tis needless.  She knows already that wherever she goes you will follow.  Does that bring any comfort to your soul, Mr. Scott?”

“Aye, Suzanne, it fills it with thankfulness.  Don’t forget to tell her that she will go soon.  Von Arnheim, Pappenheim and Kratzek are her friends, but they can’t prevent it if they would.  It may be too that they will not know when or where she goes.”

“She shall hear everything you say and, remember, that she has a brave heart.  She has less fear for herself than for you.”

She slipped away in the darkness and John went back to his own little place over the stables where he passed a night that was all but sleepless thinking over his problem and finding no good solution.  He meant to follow Julie and Suzanne in any event to the hunting lodge, but it was not sufficient merely to follow.  He must appear in some capacity that would permit him to be of service.  And yet Providence was working for him at that moment.

Prince Karl of Auersperg in his magnificent modernized apartments in the huge castle was also troubled by an inability to sleep.  Hitherto in his fifty or more years of life he had always got what he wanted.  His blood was more ancient than that of either Hohenzollern or Hapsburg.  The Auerspergs had been princes of the Holy Roman Empire for a thousand years and now he was a prince of both Teutonic empires and a general of the first rank in the army of Germany.  His wealth was so vast that he scarcely knew the extent of his own lands and here in Zillenstein he could maintain the power and state that appertained to a baron of the Middle Ages.

A mind that has only to wish for a thing to get it becomes closed in fifty years.  It mistakes desire for right.  It regards opposition as sacrilege.  Other minds that differ from it are wicked because they differ.  The thick armor of Prince Karl’s self-complacency had been pierced as it were by a tiny needle that stung, however tiny, as if its point were laden with poison.