e of the City. Accompanying them was a
burly priest with a head shaped like a pear. The padre had very small
eyes for so large a man, but they were exceedingly bright and roved
adventurously. They would settle with crafty calculation on Eloin time
and again, though his manner toward the favorite was always a thing of
humble deference.

"His Dutch Holiness from Murgie's!" Driscoll observed to himself.

But there might be an ecclesiastical college along, for all the
Missourian cared. His own thoughts were battalions. "When it's over, one
way or another," he kept deciding, "I'll speak to her, yes I will!
What's there to be afraid of? W'y, she's--only a girl." It might be an
unfair advantage, his not dying after the confession in her farewell
letter to him, but he would have her, he would have her! The Lord be
good to him, he _had_ to have her!

Late in the afternoon they arrived at the quaint old Aztec village of
Cuernavaca, which had been the country seat of Cortez, and was now that
of a second fair god and a second Hernando. After dismounting at the
hotel near the conquistador's palace, Eloin hurried Driscoll across the
plaza into the beautiful Italian gardens where Maximilian made his home.
At the villa, Charlotte's own residence in the gardens, Eloin had
himself announced to Her Majesty. The American reflected that women
seemed to have a great deal to do with the reigning business. In the
drawing room, the Empress received them.

She was a slender young woman whose lips were thin and proud, whose eyes
were dark and lustrous. Her hair was black and very heavy, coiled in the
old fashioned style away from a high forehead that was beautifully
white. She could not be older than twenty-five, and there was even a
girlishness in her bearing. But she had a steadiness of gaze--one eye
seemed the least heavy lidded--and there was a firmness to the slightly
large mouth, which gave an impression of strong lines to what was really
a soft, oval face. Yet the temperament could not be mistaken. She was a
woman of acute nerves. She was tensely strung, inordinately sensitive.

Driscoll believed now what he had heard, that the Empire fared better
when Charlotte was regent and her lord on a journey. Maximilian dreamed,
while she realized. The Hapsburg cadet, gazing over the Adriatic from
the marble steps of Miramar, had brooded fondly on what Destiny must
hold for him. He would be king of a Poland born again among the nations.
Then Lo