The princess, humoring her own fancy as well as Beverly's foibles, took to riding with her high-spirited young guest on many a little jaunt to the hills. She usually rode with Lorry or Anguish, cheerfully assuming the subdued position befitting a lady-in-waiting apparently restored to favor on probation. She enjoyed Beverly's unique position. In order to maintain her attitude as princess, the fair young deceiver was obliged to pose in the extremely delectable attitude of being Lorry's wife.
"How can you expect the paragon to make love to you, dear, if he thinks you are another man's wife?" Yetive asked, her blue eyes beaming with the fun of it all.
"Pooh!" sniffed Beverly. "You have only to consult history to find the excuse. It's the dear old habit of men to make love to queens and get beheaded for it. Besides, he is not expected to make love to me. How in the world did you get that into your head?"
On a day soon after the return of Lorry and Anguish from a trip to the frontier, Beverly expressed a desire to visit the monastery of St. Valentine, high on the mountain top. It was a long ride over the circuitous route by which the steep incline was avoided and it was necessary for the party to make an early start. Yetive rode with Harry Anguish and his wife the countess, while Beverly's companion was the gallant Colonel Quinnox. Baldos, relegated to the background, brought up the rear with Haddan.
For a week or more Beverly had been behaving toward Baldos in the most cavalier fashion. Her friends had been teasing her; and, to her own intense amazement, she resented it. The fact that she felt the sting of their sly taunts was sufficient to arouse in her the distressing conviction that he had become important enough to prove embarrassing. While confessing to herself that it was a bit treacherous and weak, she proceeded to ignore Baldos with astonishing persistency. Apart from the teasing, it seemed to her of late that he was growing a shade too confident.
He occasionally forgot his differential air, and relaxed into a very pleasing but highly reprehensible state of friendliness. A touch of the old jauntiness cropped out here and there, a tinge of the old irony marred his otherwise perfect mien as a soldier. His laugh was freer, his eyes less under subjugation, his entire personality more arrogant. It was time, thought she resentfully, that his temerity should meet some sort of check.
And, moreover, she had dreamed of him two nights in succession.
How well her plan succeeded may best be illustrated by saying that she now was in a most uncomfortable frame of mind. Baldos refused to be properly depressed by his misfortune. He retired to the oblivion she provided and seemed disagreeably content. Apparently, it made very little difference to him whether he was in or out of favor. Beverly was in high dudgeon and low spirits.
The party rode forth at an early hour in the morning. It was hot in the city, but it looked cold and bleak on the heights. Comfortable wraps were taken along, and provision was made for luncheon at an inn half way up the slope. Quinnox regaled Beverly with stories in which Grenfall Lorry was the hero and Yetive the heroine. He told her of the days when Lorry, a fugitive with a price upon his head, charged with the assassination of Prince Lorenz, then betrothed to the princess, lay hidden in the monastery while Yetive's own soldiers hunted high and low for him. The narrator dwelt glowingly upon the trip from the monastery to the city walls one dark night when Lorry came down to surrender himself in order to shield the woman he loved, and Quinnox himself piloted him through the underground passage into the very heart of the castle. Then came the exciting scene in which Lorry presented himself as a prisoner, with the denouement that saved the princess and won for the gallant American the desire of his heart.
"What a brave fellow he was!" cried Beverly, who never tired of hearing the romantic story.