ed him. They
wore dull-black gowns like his own, but they had not the frosty silver
on the hair, nor the frost-bitten refinement of the features. They were
peasants, Croat or Magyar, with broad, blunt visages and blinking eyes.
For the first time something troubled the Prince, but his courage and
diplomatic sense stood firm.

"'I fear we have not met,' he said, 'since that awful cannonade in which
your poor brother died.'

"'All my brothers died,' said the old man, still looking across the
valley. Then, for one instant turning on Otto his drooping, delicate
features, and the wintry hair that seemed to drip over his eyebrows like
icicles, he added: 'You see, I am dead, too.'

"'I hope you'll understand,' said the Prince, controlling himself almost
to a point of conciliation, 'that I do not come here to haunt you, as a
mere ghost of those great quarrels. We will not talk about who was right
or wrong in that, but at least there was one point on which we were
never wrong, because you were always right. Whatever is to be said of
the policy of your family, no one for one moment imagines that you were
moved by the mere gold; you have proved yourself above the suspicion
that...'

"The old man in the black gown had hitherto continued to gaze at him
with watery blue eyes and a sort of weak wisdom in his face. But
when the word 'gold' was said he held out his hand as if in arrest of
something, and turned away his face to the mountains.

"'He has spoken of gold,' he said. 'He has spoken of things not lawful.
Let him cease to speak.'

"Otto had the vice of his Prussian type and tradition, which is to
regard success not as an incident but as a quality. He conceived himself
and his like as perpetually conquering peoples who were perpetually
being conquered. Consequently, he was ill acquainted with the emotion
of surprise, and ill prepared for the next movement, which startled and
stiffened him. He had opened his mouth to answer the hermit, when the
mouth was stopped and the voice strangled by a strong, soft gag suddenly
twisted round his head like a tourniquet. It was fully forty seconds
before he even realized that the two Hungarian servants had done it, and
that they had done it with his own military scarf.

"The old man went again weakly to his great brazen-supported Bible,
turned over the leaves, with a patience that had something horrible
about it, till he came to the Epistle of St James, and then began to
read: 'The ton