He hesitated. His friend stopped dead, and gazed at him in unconcealed dismay.
“What?”
Maximilian stopped too, and looked steadily back at him.
“My wife.”
This time Auguste was fairly astounded. For some moments he could do nothing but stand and stare at the speaker. At length his lips parted, and the exclamation escaped him—
“Good heavens! Are you mad?”
It was the second time that afternoon that the word had been pronounced in the young man’s hearing. He turned pale, and, casting himself on the ground at the foot of a tree, burst into tears.
Overwhelmed with sorrow and remorse, his friend knelt down beside him, and tenderly sought to soothe him into a calmer frame of mind. For some time he could effect nothing, but at last the King conquered his weakness. He arose, and, thrusting his arm through his companion’s in token of forgiveness, they proceeded in silence to the palace.
In the glorious woodland lurk deadly enemies to man—the fierce wild boar and the treacherous gliding adder. Maximilian went through the forest with his friend, in ignorance that its green shades concealed the presence of two men who represented two threatening dangers in his path. He recked not of the stern, resolved messenger who was tramping steadily behind, with a grim purpose written on his face. As little did he dream that he was being preceded on his way back by another messenger, whose watchful eye had seen him enter and leave the forester’s lodge, who had started up from his hiding-place in the brushwood when the two friends emerged from the lodge gate, and, plunging into the thickness of the trees, hurried on before them to the Castle.
The spy was a young man of nearly the same age as Maximilian himself; he was dressed in a livery or uniform of green cloth, bound at the edges with red braid, of the colour of holly-berries, and ornamented with buttons of the same warm tint. He was not ill favoured—at first sight his face looked handsome—but there was a weakness in the lines of the chin, the hair and eyebrows were too light, and the eyes were of that sort that blink and turn away when closely gazed into.