rty
years a world of thought so real, it makes her gaolers shadows, and
that prison a place of no account, save that it gives her solitude and
is so more desirable than a palace. I can imagine it;" and then she
stopped, and her voice dropped to the low tone which Wogan had used.

"You looked round you but now and most fearfully. Is Koenigsmarck's
spirit here?"

"No," exclaimed Wogan; "I would to God it were! I would I felt its
memories chilling me as they chilled me that night! But I cannot. I
cannot as much as hear a whisper. All the heavens are dumb," he cried.

"And the earth waits," said Clementina.

She did not move, neither did Wogan. They both sat still as statues.
They had come to the great crisis of their destiny. A change of posture,
a gesture, an assumed expression which might avert the small, the merely
awkward indiscretions of the tongue, they both knew to be futile. It was
in the mind of each of them that somehow without their participation the
truth would out that night; for the dawn was so long in coming.

"All the way up from Peri," said Wogan, suddenly, "I strove to make real
to myself the ignominy, the odium, the scandal."

"But you could not," said Clementina, with a nod of comprehension, as
though that inability was a thing familiar to her.

"When I reached the hut, and saw that fan of light spreading from the
window, as it spread over the lawn beyond Stuttgart, I remembered Otto
von Ahlen and his talk of Koenigsmarck. I tried to hear the menaces."

"But you could not."

"No. I saw you through the window," he cried, "stretched out upon that
couch, supple and young and sweet. I saw the lamplight on your hair,
searching out the gold in its dark brown. I could only remember how
often I have at nights wakened and reached out my hands in the vain
dream that they would meet in its thick coils, that I should feel its
silk curl and nestle about my fingers. There's the truth out, though
it's a familiar truth to you ever since I held you in my arms beneath
the stars upon the road to Ala."

"It was known to me a day before," said she; "but it was known to you so
long ago as that night in the garden."

"Oh, before then," cried Wogan.

"When? Let the whole truth be known, since we know so much."

"Why, on that first day at Ohlau."

"In the great hall. I stood by the fire and raised my head, and our eyes
met. I do remember."

"But I had no thought ever to let you know. I was the King's
man-at-a