Volseni forgave Sophy its dead and wounded sons. Her popularity blazed up in a last fierce, flickering fire. The guns were taken; they would not go to Slavna; they would never batter the walls of Volseni into fragments. Slavna might be defied again. That was the great thing to Volseni, and it made little account of the snakelike line which crawled over St. Peter's Pass, and down to Dobrava, and on to Slavna. Let Slavna—hated Slavna—reckon with that! And if the snake—or another like it—came to Volseni? Well, that was better than knuckling down to Slavna. To-night King Sergius was avenged, and Queen Sophia had returned in victory!
For the first time since the King's death the bell of the ancient church rang joyously, and men sang and feasted in the gray city of the hills. Thirty from Volseni had beaten a hundred from Slavna; the guns were at the bottom of the Krath; it was enough. If Sophy had bidden them, they would have streamed down on Slavna that night in one of those fierce raids in which their forefathers of the Middle Ages had loved to swoop upon the plain.
But Sophy had no delusions. She saw her Crown—that fleeting phantom ornament, fitly foreseen in the visions of a charlatan—passing from her brow without a sigh. She had not needed Dunstanbury's arguments to prove to her that there was no place for her left in Kravonia. She was content to have it so; she had done enough. Sorrow had not passed from her face, but serenity had come upon it in fuller measure. She had struck for Monseigneur, and the blow was witness to her love. It was enough in her, and enough in little Volseni. Let the mightier avengers do the rest!
She had allowed Dunstanbury to leave her after supper in order to make preparations for a start to the frontier at dawn. "You must certainly go," she had said, "and perhaps I'll come with you."
She went at night up on to the wall—always her favorite place; she loved the spaciousness of air and open country before her there. Basil Williamson found her deep in thought when he came to tell her of the progress of the wounded.
"They're all doing well, and Peter Vassip will live. Dunstanbury has made him promise to come to him when he's recovered, so you'll meet him again at all events. And Marie Zerkovitch and her husband talk of settling in Paris. You won't lose all your Kravonian friends."
"You assume that I'm coming with you to-morrow morning?"
"I'm quite safe in assuming that Dunstanbury won't go unless you do," he answered, smiling. "We can't leave you alone here, you know."
"I shouldn't stay here, anyhow," she said. "Or, at any rate, I should be where nobody could hurt me." She pointed at a dim lantern, fastened to the gate-tower by an iron clamp, then waved her hand towards the surrounding darkness. "That's life, isn't it?" she asked. "If I believed that I could go to Monseigneur, I would go to-night—nay, I would have gone at Miklevni; it was only putting my head out of that ditch a minute sooner! If I believed even that I could lie in the church there and know that he was near! If I believed even that I could lie there quietly and remember and think of him! You're a man of science—you're not a peasant's child, as I am. What do you think? You mustn't wonder that I've had my thoughts, too. At Lady Meg's we did little else than try to find out whether we were going on anywhere else. That's all she cared about. And if she does ever get to a next world, she won't care about that; she'll only go on trying to find out whether there's still another beyond. What do you think?"
"I hardly expected to find you so philosophically inclined," he said.