“Help! For God’s sake help!” came the cry.
The latch yielded, and Armand flung back the gate.
“Come on,” he ordered, “I’m a man, and yonder a woman calls.”
He sprang down the path toward the house, which he could see now in black forbiddingness among the trees far back from the street.
Again Bernheim ventured to protest.
“It may be Lotzen’s trap, sir,” he warned.
For the shadow of an instant the Archduke hesitated; and at that moment the voice rang out again.
“Don’t strike me! Don’t str—” and a gurgling choke ended it.
“To the devil with Lotzen!” he exclaimed, and dashed on.
And Bernheim, with a silent curse, went beside him, loosening his sword as he ran, and feeling for the small revolver he had slipped inside his tunic, before they left the Epsau. To him, now, everything of mystery or danger spelled Lotzen—but even if it were not he, there was trouble enough ahead, and scandal enough, too, likely; scandal in which the Governor of Dornlitz, an Archduke, may be the King, had no place, and which could serve only to injure him before the people and in the esteem of the Nobles. Better that half the women in Dornlitz should be beaten and choked than that his master should be smirched by the tongue of calumny. He had no patience with this Quixotism that succored foolish females at foolish hours, in a place where neither the female nor they had any right to enter—and where, for her, at least, to enter was a crime. If he were able, he would have picked the Archduke up bodily, and borne him back to the palace, and have left the infernal woman to shift for herself, and to save herself or not, as her luck might rule.