“Still,” I said, “if he wants the throne he’s gummed his own game a bit, presenting her to the world as the Queen. I don’t see how he can expect to eat his own words later and remain much of a favorite.”
“All the same,” John went on, “he has waited a long time, and he doesn’t look as though he were fool enough to let a couple of women all dressed up for the last act get away with an eleventh hour conjuring trick to grab his throne away again.”
“He must want peace,” I protested, “more than a throne, or he never would have made that speech. And I’m all for that little Princess. Sweet sixteen, and baby eyes.”
“Nice to look at,” John agreed, “but not quite the stuff to cope with the ubiquitous Soviet and all the other problems of a modern state. I’d rather do my rooting for Prince Conrad. I think he looks like a decent chap.”
“All right,” I said, “but I suggest that you do any rooting in English. Then no one will understand you and it won’t get us in trouble with the authorities. And now, I have a fine suggestion. Let’s beat it for the frontier and Castle Waldek.”
John agreed to that, but added a proviso that we beat it fast because we probably should not be allowed to cross the frontier after whatever moment the authorities might have settled as the right one to close the Pass to strangers. Mountain roads would probably be inconvenient in the dark, anyway. My watch showed seven minutes past six. It was three hours since we had first stopped in the Cathedral Square. “We may have time, tonight,” I said, “though I doubt it. Let’s get out of here anyway. Once we are out of the city we will be able to forget all about the affairs of the Alarian Royal Family, and good riddance, too.”
“Stick-in-a-rut,” said John, “I was just beginning to enjoy myself.”
All the traffic was headed in the opposite direction, so we made excellent time. There were no road signs in the city, but I guided our career by a combination of the Baedeker map and the sun. We were lucky, and came out on the right road after only one short detour. When we found it, it was a wide city street, closely lined with beautiful houses, with grass and trees before them. Soon it became a street of villas, and then quite suddenly we were in the real country, with the high mountains of the frontier looming ahead of us in the distance.
We drove probably five or six miles before we came to a small town with an inn. We stopped there long enough to buy cold meat, sliced bread, and a bottle of warm wine so that we could eat as we drove. I took the wheel, and munched contentedly. The bread was heavy, dark, peasant’s fare, the wine was the commonest, and the meat mere boiled mutton, but we were hungry enough to enjoy it, while feeling a little sorry to be on the road again, and even I was a little sorrier that our way did not lie in the path of riots and revolutions. I was just thinking that it was a pity, in a way, not to have stayed, when john spoke. “Of course all that was none of our business,” he said, “and if we had stayed we should probably have been jailed as spies and died of boredom and bad food and dirt, and I know I’m talking nonsense, but I have a small boy’s hankering to be back in the middle of that square.”
“Don’t worry,” I cautioned, “we’re not out of Alaria yet, though we’ll go back if you say so.”