He took down the receiver and put it to his ear.

“Who is there?” asked a deep voice, which he knew to be that of Prince Karl.

“Castel, Your Highness.”

“You arrived without accident?”

“Wholly without accident, Your Highness.  We reached the lodge a few minutes before the storm broke.”

“The lady, Mademoiselle Lannes, is safe and comfortable?”

“Entirely so.  Your Highness.  The maid, Suzanne, is preparing her room for her.”

“You found Muller there waiting for you according to instructions?”

Some prudential motive prompted John to reply: 

“Yes, Your Highness, he had everything ready and was waiting.  I presented your letter at once.”

“You have done well, Castel.  Keep the lady within the house, but the storm will do that anyhow.  Do not under any circumstances call me up, but I will call you again when I think fit.  Bear in mind that the reward of both you and Muller shall be large, if you serve me well in this most important matter.”

“Yes, Your Highness.  I thank you now.”

“Keep it in mind, always.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

His Highness, Prince Karl of Auersperg, replaced the telephone stand upon the table in his bedroom at Zillenstein, and John Scott hung up the receiver in the hunting lodge on the mountain.

“It was Prince Karl,” he said to Julie, who still stood motionless looking at him.  “He wanted to know if you were safe and comfortable and I said yes.  He said he would call us up again but he won’t.”

He lifted a chair and shattered the telephone to fragments.

“It might afford a peculiar pleasure to talk with him,” he said, “but it’s best that we have no further communication while we’re here.  An incautious word or two might arouse suspicion and that’s what we want most to avoid.  When he fails to get an answer to his call he’ll think that this huge snow has broken down the wire.  Most likely it will do so anyhow.  And now, Miss Julie, Suzanne has your room ready for you.  If you wish to withdraw to it for a little while you’ll find dinner waiting you when you return.”

“And the day of the abandoned hotel in Chastel has come back?”

“But a better and a longer day.  We’re prisoners here together on the mountain, you and I, and your chaperon, servant and sometime ruler, Suzanne Picard, who I find is not as grim as she looks.”

There was a spark in his eyes as he looked at her, and an answering fire leaped up in her own.  He was in very truth a perfect and gentle knight, who would gladly come so far and through so many dangers for her and for her alone.  He was her very own champion, and as her dark blue eyes looked into the gray deeps of his her soul thrilled with the knowledge of it.  Deep red flushed her from brow to chin, and then slowly ebbed away.

“John,” she said, putting her hand in his, “no woman has ever owed more gratitude to a man.”