The Princess Dehra

BY JOHN REED SCOTT
AUTHOR OF “THE COLONEL OF THE RED HUZZARS,” “BEATRIX OF CLARE,” ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR BY CLARENCE F. UNDERWOOD
PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 1908
Copyright, 1908, by John Reed Scott
Published May, 1906
Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company The Washington Square Press, Philadelphia, U. S. A.
TO THE REAL PRINCESS
For the first time in a generation the Castle of Lotzen was entertaining its lord. He had come suddenly, a month before, and presently there had followed rumors of strange happenings in Dornlitz, in which the Duke had been too intimately concerned to please the King, and as punishment had been banished to his mountain estates. But Lotzenia was far from the Capital and isolated, and the people cared more for their crops and the amount of the tax levy than for the doings of the Court. And so it concerned them very little why the red banner with the golden cross floated from the highest turret of the old pile of stone, on the spur of the mountain overhanging the foaming Dreer. They knew it meant the Duke himself was in presence; but to them there was but one over-lord: the Dalberg, who reigned in Dornlitz; and in him they had all pride—for was not the Dalberg their hereditary chieftain centuries before he was the King!
True, the Duke of Lotzen had long been the Heir Presumptive, and so, in the prospective, entitled to their loyalty, but lately there had come from across the Sea a new Dalberg, of the blood of the great Henry, who, it was said, had displaced him in the line of Succession, and was to marry the Princess Dehra.
And at her name every woman of them curtsied and every man uncovered; blaming High Heaven the while, that she might not reign over them, when Frederick the King were gone; and well prepared to welcome the new heir if she were to be his queen.
At first the Duke had kept to the seclusion of his own domain, wide and wild enough to let him ride all day without crossing its boundary, but after a time he came at intervals, with a companion or two, into the low-lands, choosing the main highways, and dallying occasionally at some cross-road smithy for a word of gossip with those around the forge.