He left her
standing beneath the dripping trees and crept towards the side of the
house. A sentry was posted beneath her Highness's windows, and through
those windows he had to climb. He needed that quarter of an hour to
wait for a suitable moment when the sentry would be at the far end of
his beat. But that sentry was fuddling himself with a vile spirit
distilled from the gentian flower in the kitchen of "The White Chamois."
Wogan, creeping stealthily through the snow-storm, found the side of the
house unguarded. The windows on the ground floor were dark; those on the
first floor which lighted her Highness's apartments were ablaze. He
noticed with a pang of dismay that one of those lighted windows was wide
open to the storm. He wondered whether it meant that the Princess had
been removed to another lodging. He climbed on the sill of the lower
window; by the side of that window a stone pillar ran up the side of the
house to the windows on the first floor. Wogan had taken note of that
pillar months back when he was hawking chattels in Innspruck. He set his
hands about it and got a grip with his foot against the sash of the
lower window. He was just raising himself when he heard a noise above
him. He dropped back to the ground and stood in the fixed attitude of a
sentinel.

A head appeared at the window, a woman's head. The light was behind,
within the room, so that Wogan could not see the face. But the shape of
the head, its gracious poise upon the young shoulders, the curve of the
neck, the bright hair drawn backwards from the brows,--here were marks
Wogan could not mistake. They had been present before his eyes these
many months. The head at the open window was the head of the Princess.
Wogan felt a thrill run through his blood. To a lover the sight of his
mistress is always unexpected, though he foreknows the very moment of
her coming. To Wogan the sight of his Queen had the like effect. He had
not seen her since he had left Ohlau two years before with her promise
to marry the Chevalier. It seemed to him, though for this he had lived
and worked up early and down late for so long, a miraculous thing that
he should see her now.

She leaned forward and peered downwards into the lane. The light
streamed out, bathing her head and shoulders. Wogan could see the snow
fall upon her dark hair and whiten it; it fell, too, upon her neck, but
that it could not whiten. She leaned out into the darkness, and Wogan
set foot again