Glancing at her sharply with those unfathomable eyes, he just gave a slight deprecating drop of the head as he replied firmly—
“Not mine, Princess, but the State’s.”
“The State’s!” she echoed hotly. “You take too much upon yourself. I will not submit to it. You may rule my father, but you shall not control my actions.”
He was looking at her fixedly now. There was little of the courtier about the old minister as he retorted pointedly, “It is a pity your Highness should render control from outside a necessity.”
Her teeth were set in her lip till it was as white as her complexion. Only the heaving of her bosom betrayed the force of her excitement. “It is neither necessary nor acceptable,” she returned imperiously. All this time the question she longed, yet dreaded to ask, was at her lips, yet unspoken, as though she were fearful to invoke the spectre of the truth. Yet she felt that to be thus at issue with Rollmar was purposeless and undignified; it was certainly not for that she had accosted him. Now she felt she must put the question, let the consequences be what they might. She took a steadying breath, but there was just a little flinching drop of the eyes, and then, in a voice which would have struck a passing observer as quietly cold, almost indifferent, she said—
“As you have gone to last night’s unwarrantable lengths, may I ask, Baron, the result of your creatures’ attack?”
“Ah!” The suspicion of a smile softened for an instant the hard, dry mask that confronted her. Had he suspected her reason for alluding to a subject she would naturally have avoided? Anyhow, it was patent now. “The result,” he answered slowly, “I cannot tell you.”
She gave a look of something like disgust at his almost brutal want of consideration. Did he mean to force her to question him further, and so incidentally acknowledge the facts of her part in the affair? It was hateful, yet, she told herself, quite like him. She wished she could strike him dead as he stood there before her mocking her almost frantic anxiety with a smile of infinite evasion. Was the man a fiend that he would not speak more fully? The answer he had given her was truly Delphic. It might mean nothing, and, what was more probable, it might mean the worst. Still, as she had stooped to ask, she would press her question now till she got a tangible answer.
“I wish to know,” she said insistently, “what happened to the person whom you set your men to attack?”
But for a trace of temper she was quite calm now. The chill of despair was creeping over her, and the racking suspense gave way before it. Rollmar looked at her curiously, almost as though wondering whether he might attribute her calm to a callousness akin to his own.