en troth,
then straightened up and walked like some beautiful simulacrum of a
woman towards the door which Vollmar held open for her....

The earth-hours passed, and the two men kept their watch by the bed,
conversing now and then in whispers between long intervals of anxious
silence, until three strokes sounded from the bell of the Castle clock.
The whole household, save one fair woman, who, in softly-slippered feet,
was pacing the floor of her bedroom, was fast asleep, and the days of
sentries were far past. Von Kessner gently lifted one of the arms lying
on the coverlet of the bed and let it fall. It dropped as the arm of a
man who had just died might have done. Again he raised an eyelid, this
time with some difficulty. The eyeball beneath was fixed and glassy as
that of a corpse. He nodded across the bed to the Russian, and together
they turned the bedclothes down to the foot. Then from under the bed he
pulled out a bundle of grey skins which he spread on the floor beside
the bed. It was a sleeping bag such as hunters use in winter on the
snow-swept plains and forests of Northern Europe. Vollmar turned the
head-flap back. Then they lifted the body of the Prince from the bed,
slid it into the sack, and buttoned the flap down over the face.

"That Egyptian's drug has worked well," whispered Von Kessner.

Vollmar nodded, and whispered back:

"I wish I had a handful of it. But it is time. He will be ready for us
now."

Even as he spoke the locked door opened, as it were of its own accord,
and Phadrig stood in the room dressed in the livery of the Prince's
coachman. Von Kessner and Vollmar turned grey as he bowed, and
whispered:

"The doors are open, Excellencies, and all is ready!"

Then the three lifted the shapeless bag and carried it with noiseless
tread down to the hall and out through the half-open doors to where a
carriage drawn by four black horses stood waiting. Though there was no
one in charge of them, they stood as still as though carved out of
blocks of black marble until the body of the Prince had been laid in the
carriage and Von Kessner and Vollmar had taken their places beside it.
Then Phadrig mounted the box, shook the reins, and the rubber-shod
horses moved silently away at a trot, which, as soon as the main road
was reached, became a gallop only a little less silent than the trot.

The carriage turned aside from the road, and ran down a broad forest
lane till it stopped by the shore of a litt