‘Add that boys ought to marry girls and not grown women, and you will say what the world will say as soon as it hears of this,’ she returned, with some bitterness. ‘That is what I have told Alexander; and he has sworn upon the crucifix in my presence that he will marry only me.’
‘Leave Servia. Spend a year on the Riviera—or in Paris’—she glanced swiftly at me as I said this—‘and he may change his resolution.’
The Servian’s reply startled me.
‘I cannot. At this moment I am under secret arrest.’
‘Under arrest?’
‘You forget that Alexander has made himself master, and that reasons of State cover a great deal in Servia which they would not cover in France.’
I was staggered. A stranger situation I had never encountered in all my strange experience.
‘He holds you a prisoner till you consent to become his Queen!’
‘Till I become his Queen,’ she corrected.
I sat still for a minute, considering. The chancelleries and the public of Europe would never believe this story. They would think, they were already thinking and saying, that the Countess was an adventuress, luring the young King to his ruin.