timatising the child; his one object was to
conceal my shame. This he succeeded in doing. I gave birth to a boy,
and my love for him has been the great solace of my life."

"And he is living, madame?" I ventured to ask.

"Yes, living," she answered, the sweet smile playing about her lips
again--"living, and the greatest comfort God has given me in my trials.

"From his babyhood he was the one thought I had; his training, his
education, the fostering of good in his receptive mind that he might
grow up a good man. And he has repaid me a thousandfold.

"But in those years great troubles came upon me. Prince Adalbert,
known as one of the greatest roues and spendthrifts in Europe, had
succeeded his father two years after he left me, and was now Grand
Duke. His first wife had been taken back again--or he never could have
faced his people--and had borne him a son. This son was fated to be
the scourge of my life hereafter.

"Meanwhile, in the throes of a continental war, the Grand Duchy of
Rittersheim was absorbed into the neighbouring great state, and the
Grand Duke Adalbert, deposed and impoverished, became simply a
pensioner, and a most importunate blackmailer of myself.

"His one great object in life--and later he confided this secret, with
the story of our marriage, to his son--was to obtain possession of the
great fortune in diamonds, still locked in the steel safe bequeathed me
by my father, and which I had steadfastly refused to part with, nay,
even to withdraw a single stone from.

"But the value had, in the drink-distorted mind of the Grand Duke
Adalbert, become immensely exaggerated. The safe was believed by his
son Waldemar to contain diamonds to the value of five millions of
English pounds!"

Hence his intense rapacity in later years; for when my boy was
twenty-five his father, the Grand Duke Adalbert, died, and was
succeeded in the title only, for the power was gone, by his son
Waldemar, but two years younger than my own.

"This Waldemar appears to have been evilly disposed from boyhood, and
embittered against mankind in general, first by the loss of his Duchy,
and in addition by the destruction of an eye which he suffered in some
low fracas, for his delight was to mingle and drink with the lowest of
mankind. On his father's death he came to Valoro and demanded that the
pension paid to the late Duke by me should be continued to him!

"This was refused.

"Then he had the impudence to try and ba