The Prince Ivan laughed.
"I am not so complaisant as you, Louis, nor yet so modest. Give me my bride on the day Joan of the Sword Hand sleeps in the palace of Courtland as its princess, and I will take my chance of winning our Margaret's love!"
CHAPTER XVII
WOMAN'S WILFULNESS
Joan rode on, silent, a furlong before her men.
Behind her sulked Maurice von Lynar. Had any been there to note, their faces were now strangely alike in feature, and yet more curiously unlike in expression. Joan gazed forward into the distance like a soul dead and about to be reborn, planning a new life. Maurice von Lynar looked more like a naughty schoolboy whom some tyrant Fate, rod-wielding, has compelled to obey against his will.
Yet, in spite of expression, it was Maurice von Lynar who was planning the future. Joan's heart was yet too sore. Her tree of life had, as it were, been cut off close to the ground. She could not go back to the old so soon after her blissful year of dreams. There was to be no new life for her. She could not take up the old. But Maurice—his thoughts were all for the Princess Margaret, of the ripple of her golden hair, of her pretty wilful words and ways, of that dimple on her chin, and, above all, of her threat to seek him out if—but it was not possible that she could mean that. And yet she looked as though she might make good her words. Was it possible? He posed himself with this question, and for half an hour rode on oblivious of all else.
"Eh?" he said at last, half conscious that some one had been speaking to him from an infinite distance. "Eh? Did you speak, Captain von Orseln?"
Von Orseln grunted out a little laugh, almost silently, indeed, and expressed more by a heave of his shoulders than by any alteration of his features.