“Only a request that, now I have satisfied your curiosity, I may be at liberty to join my friend and prepare for our departure.”
“Certainly, when your carriage is ready.” With a cunning smile, he moved to the door and went out quickly, closing it behind him. When she tried to follow him she found she was again a prisoner.
The Count had bolted the door behind him, and now went straight to the room that had been allotted to the Princess. A very different apartment it was from poor Minna’s; for, whereas that was repulsively dismal and terrifying, Ruperta’s lodging was luxuriously furnished and pleasant in the highest degree. The windows looked out upon the valley and the stretch of pine-clad mountains beyond; there was no hint of a possible prison in those cheerful rooms, the appointments of which went, in their delicate refinement, far beyond anything which that part of the castle they had seen the night before would have led one to expect. The apartment was as magnificent as anything Ruperta had known in her father’s palace; but for her anxiety to be on the way again she could have delighted in the pleasant rest and change of scene. As yet no shadow of a suspicion of her host’s intentions had come to her. She was awaiting with some impatience Minna’s appearance to join her half finished breakfast, when she was told that the Count asked permission to pay his respects to her. He came in, another man from him who had just left Minna. He was now the very perfection of grave courtesy; the attentive host, the open-hearted sportsman.
“I had expected the Lieutenant and his friend back before this,” he observed, after their greeting. “It is long since they went off to inspect the broken carriage.”
“You do not think harm can have come to them?” Ruperta suggested, noticing his serious expression.
“That,” he replied, “is scarcely possible, since I sent several of my men with them.”
She was reassured by his words. “That is well. No doubt they will soon be ready to start.”
“You are in great haste to leave us, Fräulein?”
“Not that, Count. But we have a long journey before us.”
“Ah, yes. It is sad that the pleasure of one must be the pain of another.”