“If you are a spy your experience will be brief,” he announced.

Blanco smiled.

“That is as it should be, Senor.  Spies are not entitled to an old age.”

“We are going to test you,” continued the officer.  “We have need of men of courage.  If, as you claim, the Duke sent you, he must have done so because he regarded you as available.  If you prove trustworthy, all right.  If not, it is your misfortune, because in the place where we mean to use you you will have no opportunity to betray us, and a very excellent opportunity of meeting death.  We cannot now communicate with His Grace for corroboration, so we shall let you prove yourself.  You seem to bear no message from the Duke.  That has the smell of suspicion.”

“On the contrary,” retorted the Spaniard, “the Duke believed that a man who was a stranger might prove of value.  I was to take my instructions from you.”

Blanco wondered vaguely what the future held for him.  Evidently their acceptance of his services was to bear a close resemblance to imprisonment.  He could see in the programme small opportunity to serve the King.  His instructions had been to win into their confidence and do what he could.

* * * * *

Two weeks later, in the small garden giving off from the King’s private apartments, and perched half-way up the buttressed side of the rock on which sat the Palace, Karyl impatiently awaited the coming of Colonel Von Ritz.  Below he could hear a brass band in the Botanical Gardens and out in the bay a German war-ship, decorated for a dance, blazed like a set piece in a pyrotechnic display.

There was peace, summer, perfume, in the moonlit air and Karyl smiled ironically as he reflected that even the bodyguard so carefully selected by Von Ritz might at any moment enter the place and raise the shout of “Long live King Louis!”

Leaning over the parapet, he could see one of his fantastically uniformed soldiery pacing back and forth before a sentry-box, his musket jauntily shouldered, and a bayonet glinting at his belt.  Karyl stood looking, and his lips curled skeptically as he wondered whether the man would repel or admit assassins.

Somewhat wearily the King turned and leaned on the stone coping of the outer wall.  He was at one end where a shadow cloaked him, but he lighted a cigarette and the match that flared up threw an orange-red light on his face, showing eyes which were lusterless.  For a few moments he held the match in his hollowed palms, coaxing its blaze in the breeze.  Before it had burned out there came a sharp report and Karyl heard the spat of flattening lead on the masonry at his back.  The echo rattled along the rocky side of the hill.  One of the sentry-boxes had answered his unasked question of loyalty.

He waited.  There was no rush of feet.  No medley of anxiously inquiring voices.  Others had heard the report, of course, yet no one hastened to inquire and investigate.  The King, pacing farther back where his silhouette was less clearly defined, laughed again, very bitterly.