Sonya gripped her. “What is he thinking? Tell me! Tell me quickly!”
Then she too, received the thoughts. She sat tense. “Oh, the princess is dead! Killed!”
“Killed!” echoed Dolores. Then her face went vague: she was getting nothing more.
But evidently Sonya was still in communication. She cried aloud involuntarily, “Altho! Dearest, dearest Altho! Where are you? Tell Sonya. Oh, he does not know! Or he cannot tell me! He says—” it was a stark whisper of horror—“he says soon he will be killed too.”
She sprang to her feet, then abruptly sat down again. “Altho! Altho, where are you?”
The communication broke. Her face went vague, puzzled, empty. And then despairing.
Beyond the window, in the street below the balcony, a sudden murmur of voices floated up to us. We went to the balcony. It was night now, a night of pale stars in a cloudless sky. Shouting people were coming up the street. They appeared in a moment at the bottom of the hill, a crowd of men, a hundred or more. They came forward, swept around the corner, and vanished. Above the babble was a single sentence. A man called it. Others took it up.
Sonya murmured, “They say, ‘Our king is dying.’ And the princess dead! And your grandfather. . . . Death everywhere!”
The man in the street shouted again. And Sonya sprang from the couch.
“He says, ‘Our king is dead.’ ” She laughed hysterically. “Death everywhere! I must go to the Island of the Virgins. Will you come? I can take you. The virgins are ready! We must act at once!”