"Good-bye to the mountains, to-morrow morning," he said to his chosen comrades. "Hey for work and Salzbrück again!" 80
She was going to Salzbrück in a few days, according to Frau Johann. But Salzbrück was not Heiligengelt, and Maximilian the Emperor was not, at his palace, in the way of meeting tourists. It was good-bye to Miss de Courcy as well as to the mountains.
"She'll never know to whom she gave her ring," he thought, with the dense innocence of a man who has studied all books save woman's looks. "And I'll never know who gives her a plain gold one for the finger on which she once wore this."
But in the next room, divided from him by a single wall, sat Princess Sylvia of Eltzburg-Neuwald.
"When we meet again at Salzbrück, he must never dream that I knew all the time," she was saying to herself. "Some day I shall long to confess. But I could only confess to a man who excused, because he loved me. And suppose that day should never come?"
CHAPTER V
NOT DOWN IN THE PROGRAMME
LETTERS of introduction for Lady de Courcy and her daughter to those best worth knowing among Rhaetia's haute noblesse were a part of the "plan" concocted in the Richmond garden—that plan which the Grand Duchess had seen and dreaded in Sylvia's shining eyes.
The widow of the Hereditary Grand Duke of Eltzburg-Neuwald was reported in the papers to be travelling with the Princess Sylvia in Canada and the United States. Fortunately for the plot, the elder lady had spent so many years in retirement in England, and had, even in her youth, met so few Rhaetians, that there was little fear of any embarrassing contretemps. Her objections to the unconventional attempt to win a lover, instead of resting content with a mere husband, were based on other grounds; Sylvia had overcome them, 82 nevertheless; and, in the end, the Grand Duchess had proved not only docile but positively fertile in expedient. She it was who suggested, since the adoption of borrowed plumes was a necessity, that de Courcy, her mother's maiden name, should be chosen.