Her eyes were round with surprise.
“And how did it come there?”
“I cannot imagine. That is why I’d like you to tell me what you know of it.”
“And before you found it on the floor of your room you had never seen it?”
“Never. I swear it by the sun-god yonder.”
“My great-uncle never showed it to you—never told you of it?”
“Never,” Grey repeated.
“He showed it to me in London,” she confessed, reaching out for the finger it adorned, “and told me all about it. It seems that when he left Budavia it had in some way got in with his effects. He did not find it until a year or more afterward. It had belonged to the King before his coronation, and to his father before him, and to his grandfather before that. The arms are those of the Prince of Kronfeld. The Crown Prince is always, you know, the Prince of Kronfeld.”
“And as the little Prince of Kronfeld had been kidnapped and Uncle Schlippenbach did not know where to find him, he simply put the ring away for safe-keeping, eh?” asked Grey, quizzically.
“He was taking it back to Kürschdorf when he died,” Minna answered, with rebuke in her tone. “As soon as he heard that the Crown Prince had been found he started. He wished, he said, to put it on his finger with his own hand. ‘His Royal Highness will probably travel incognito,’ he said to me, ‘but I shall know him; and when we meet I shall give him the ring. When you see it worn you will know that the wearer is the Crown Prince.’”