set tenderly down in the very doorway of the Pilgrim Inn, and he
found Clementina at the window of an unlighted room gazing unperceived
at the throng.

"Here's a true welcome, madam," said he, cordially, with his thoughts
away upon that bluff of hillside where the acclamations had seemed so
distant and unreal. It is possible that they seemed of small account to
Clementina now, for though they rang in ears and were visible to her
eyes, she sat quite unmoved by them.

"This is one tiny square in a little town," he continued. "But its
shouts will ring across Europe;" and she turned her head to him and said
quietly,--

"The King is still in Spain, is he not?"

Wogan's enthusiasm was quenched in alarm. Her voice had rung, for all
its quietude, with pride. What if she guessed what he for one would not
let his wildest fancy dwell upon? Wogan repeated to himself the resolve
which he had made, though with an alteration. "The King must marry the
Princess," he had said; now he said, "The Princess must marry the King."

He began hurriedly to assure her that the King had doubted his capacity
to bring the enterprise to a favourable issue, but that now he would
without doubt return. Cardinal Origo would tell her more upon that head
if she would be good enough to receive him at ten in the morning; and
while Wogan was yet speaking, a torch waved, and amongst that
close-pressed throng of faces below him in the street, one sprang to his
view with a remarkable distinctness, a face most menacing and
vindictive. It was the face of Harry Whittington. Just for a second it
shone out, angles and lines so clearly revealed that it was as though
the crowd had vanished, and that one contorted face glared alone at the
windows in a flare of hell-fire.

Clementina saw the face too, for she drew back instinctively within the
curtains of the window.

"The man at Peri," said she, in a whisper.

"Your Highness will pardon me," exclaimed Wogan, and he made a movement
towards the door. Then he stopped, hesitated for a second, and came
back. He had a question to put, as difficult perhaps as ever lips had to
frame.

"At Peri," he said in a stumbling voice, "I waked from a dream and saw
that man, bird-like and cunning, watching over the rim of the stairs. I
was dreaming that a star out of heaven stooped towards me, that a
woman's face shone out of the star's bright heart, that her lips deigned
to bend downwards to my earth. And I wonder, I wonder whe