“I have a message to the Czaritza which I am instructed to give to her majesty in person,” I told him. “Be good enough to let her know that the messenger from the Queen of England has arrived.”
He went out of the room, and at the end of ten minutes the door opened again and admitted—the Princess Y——!
Overpowered by this unlucky accident, as I at first supposed it to be, I rose to my feet, muttering some vague phrase of courtesy.
But the Princess soon showed me that the meeting did not take her by surprise.
“So you have a message for my dear mistress?” she cried in an accent of gay reproach. “And you never breathed a word of it to me. Mr. Sterling, I shall begin to think you are a conspirator. How long did you say you had known that good Mr. Place? But I am talking while her majesty is waiting. Have you any password by which the Czaritza will know whom you come from?”
“I can tell that only to her majesty, I am afraid,” I answered guardedly.
“I am in her majesty’s confidence.”
And bringing her exquisite face so near to mine that I was oppressed by the scent of the tuberoses in her bosom, she whispered three syllables in my ear.
Dismayed by this proof of the fatal progress the dangerous police agent had already made, I could only admit by a silent bow that the password was correct.
“Then come with me, Mr. Sterling,” the Princess said with what sounded like a malicious accent on the name.