At last, as he paced one of the main parlors of the hotel, his eyes riveted on the street entrance, he heard a laugh behind him; a laugh tempered with a vibrant mellowness which was of a sort with no other laugh, and which set him vibrating in turn, as promptly as a tuning-fork answers to its note.

The sound brought him round in such electric haste as almost resulted in collision with the girl behind him.

He was prepared, of course, to find in her incognita no suggestion of Royalty, yet now when he met her standing alone, and could take the hand she held out to him with her heart-breaking, heart-recompensating smile, he felt a distinct sense of astonishment.

“I’m having a holiday,” she declared.  “It’s to be the Queen’s day off and you are being allowed to play host with the Isis.  Do you approve?”

With abandonment to the delight of mere propinquity, he laid away sorrow against the returning time of her absence, as one lays away an umbrella until the next shower.

“Approve?” he mocked.  “It’s like asking the drowning man if he approves of being picked up.”

For a moment her eyes clouded and a droop threatened her lips.

“But,” she said in a softer tone, “what if you’ve got to be thrown back into the sea again?” Then she added, “And, you see, I have.  Probably I’m very foolish to come.  The prison will only be blacker, but I couldn’t stand it.  I wanted—­” She looked at him with the frankness which has nothing to conceal—­“I wanted to forget it all for a little time.”

With a frigid salutation, Colonel Von Ritz arrived.  As he addressed the American, despite his flawless courtesy, his voice still carried the undercurrent of antagonism which no word of his had ever failed to convey to Benton, since their first meeting in America.

“If Miss Carstow”—­he uttered the assumed name with distaste—­“will excuse you,” he suggested, “I should like a word.”

Von Ritz led the way out of doors and between the tables and trellises of the garden until he came upon a spot which seemed to promise the greatest possible degree of privacy.  There he stopped and stood looking straight ahead of him.

“All that I now tell you, Mr. Benton”—­his voice was even and polite to a nicety, yet distinctly icy—­“is of course a message from the King.”

“Meaning,” Benton smiled with polite indifference, “that your personal communications with me would be few?”

“Meaning,” corrected Von Ritz gravely, “that in His Majesty’s affairs, I speak only on His Majesty’s authority.”

“Colonel, I am at your service.”

“In the first place,” began the Galavian at last, “His Majesty wished me to explain why he has presumed on your further assistance.  You are the only man outside Galavia who understands—­and whom the King may implicitly trust, trust even with the safety of Her Majesty, the Queen.”

“You will convey to the King my appreciation of his confidence.”  Somehow, between the American and this emissary of Karyl, there could never be any attitude other than that of the utmost formality.