The apartment in the Flag Tower to which Carey Grey was conducted by Chancellor von Ritter was at the top of two flights of winding stone stairs, and the barred windows of its four rooms commanded a view of varied and picturesque loveliness. In the foreground were the Palace gardens, with their series of descending terraces, their fountains and statuary, their parterres of gay flowers, their gracefully curving driveways and gravelled walks, and their wonderful old trees of every shade of green leafage. Beyond the gardens were the red and grey roofs, the spires and steeples and domes and turrets of the city, divided by the sparkling silver-white waters of the rushing river, and beyond these stretched the fertile valley checkered with fields of ripening grain—yellow and orange and russet—and olive patches of woodland, and dotted with farm houses and cottages and barns and hayricks.
The rooms, themselves, were somewhat sombre. There was a small library, panelled and finished in black oak; a salon, long and high, with much tarnished gilt ornamentation and red upholstery; a tiny bare dressing-room, and a bedchamber with a great canopied bedstead, beside which stood a quaintly carved prie-dieu.
“Your Royal Highness will, I trust, be comfortable here,” said the Chancellor, when he had walked with Grey from one room to another and the two were standing together in the long salon.
The American hesitated a moment before replying. He was revolving mentally several alternatives of action. It was his duty, he knew, not to let this farce proceed further; and yet he had thus far learned absolutely nothing.
“I shall,” he said, at length, “be quite comfortable.”
“If there is anything your Royal Highness desires,” continued the Chancellor, “you have but to make it known.”
The invitation arrested the whirl of indecision and settled the course of procedure.
“If you will be so good as to answer me a few questions, Count,” Grey began, “I shall be indebted. Won’t you sit down?”
Count von Ritter found a place for his angular length upon a settee beside a pedestalled bust of King Oswald the First, and Grey sank into a chair near by.
“I am entirely at your Royal Highness’s disposal,” the Chancellor avowed, amiably; and the American, not without some trepidation, it must be confessed, began: