“I have the honor to command the guard, Your Grace,” said the man in a respectful voice.  “It is by the order of His Majesty, King Louis.”  Something in the enunciation puzzled Karyl with a hint of the familiar.

“Why do you remain outside?” he asked.

“Over this wall, any comparatively agile man might make his way to the beach, if he succeeded in passing the muskets of the sentry-boxes—­and there are boats at the water’s edge,” explained the soldier with a short laugh.  “I am responsible for the guard, so I keep this post myself.  I believe myself incorruptible and men with thrones at stake might make tempting offers.”

Karyl smiled.  “What would you regard as a tempting offer?” he suggested.

For answer the man came into the light and lifted his cap.  The King looked into the dark eyes of Manuel Blanco.  “I won into their confidence by the hardest,” he explained in a lowered tone, “but after that, I had no opportunity to leave them or communicate with you.  This was all I could do.  As it is, I shall be recognized as soon as the Duke arrives.”

Blanco raised his voice again in casual conversation and beckoned to the sentinel at the door.  When the man approached the Spaniard pointed over the wall.  “Do you see that rock?  Is that a figure crouching behind its shelter?” he demanded.  As the man leaned forward, Manuel suddenly struck him heavily at the back of the neck with a loose stone caught up from the masonry’s coping.  The soldier dropped without a sound.

“Now, Your Majesty, we must risk it down the rock,” prompted the man from Cadiz, in hurried, low-pitched words.  “Moments are invaluable....  It is only while I command the guard that there is a chance of your escape....  An officer may come at any instant on a round of inspection—­my discovery as the Duke’s kidnapper is a matter of minutes....  I have been watched and tested in a hundred ways; it was only to-day that I convinced them of my fanatic zeal.”

Blanco hurriedly gave his cap and cape to the King, donning himself the blouse of Karyl’s undress uniform.  Then the two crept cautiously down the rifted face of the cliff, holding the shadow of the crevices.  One sentry-box they passed safely, and finally they edged by the second unnoticed.  They had negotiated the hundred feet of descent and stood pressed against the bottom, hugging the black shadow.  They were waiting an opportunity to slip across a narrow sliver of intervening moonlight to the beach and the boat which lay at the water’s edge.

Occasional lazy clouds drifted across the sky.  The two refugees, goaded by the realization that every wasted second cut their desperate hope more and more to a vanishing point, watched the fleecy scraps of mist skim by the moon afar off without veiling its face.  Then for a short moment a shred of silver-tipped cloud cut off the radiance.  Blanco seized the King’s arm in a wordless signal.  Karyl and the bull-fighter raced across to the boat that lay