She looked up, smiling.
“Has Majesty gone?” she asked.
“Gone for the present,” replied the Professor, beginning to put one foot cautiously before the other down a roughly hewn stairway in the otherwise almost inaccessible cliff. “But, like the sun which is setting to-night, he will rise again to-morrow!”
“Shall I come and help you down?” enquired the girl, turning on her elbow as she lay, and lifting her lovely face, radiant as a flower, towards him.
“Whether down or up, you shall never help me, my princess!” he replied. “When I can neither climb nor fall without the assistance of a woman’s hand, I shall take a pistol and tell it to whisper in my ear—‘Good-bye, Heinrich Von Glauben! You are all up—finish—gone!’”
Here, with a somewhat elephantine jump, he alighted beside her and threw himself on the warm sand with a deep sigh of mingled exhaustion and relief.
“You would be very wicked to put a pistol to your ear,” said Gloria severely;—“It is only a coward who shoots himself!”
“Ach so! And it is a brave man who shoots others! That is curious, is it not, princess? It is a little bit of man’s morality; but we have no time to discuss it now. We have something more serious to consider,—your husband!”
She looked at him wonderingly.
“My husband? Do you really think he will be very angry that the King saw me?”