'Not that he was taken to-night, in Tzerclas' company,' I answered, 'and is a prisoner at this moment at the Burg, charged, along with the villain Neumann, with a plot to admit the enemy into the city?'
My lady sat down, her face pale, her aspect changed, as the countryside changes when the sun goes down. 'He was there' she muttered--'with Tzerclas?'
I nodded.
'The Waldgrave Rupert--my cousin?' she murmured, as if the thing passed the bounds of reason.
'Yes, my lady,' I said, as gently as I could. 'But he is mad. I am assured that he is mad. He has been mad for weeks past. We know it. We have known it. Besides, he knew nothing, I am sure, of Tzerclas' plans.'
'But--he was there!' she cried. 'He was one of those two men they carried by? One of those!'
'Yes,' I said.
She sat for a moment stricken and silent, the ghost of herself. Then, in a voice little above a whisper, she asked what they would do to him.
I shrugged my shoulders. To be candid, I had not given the Waldgrave much thought, though in a way he had saved my life. Now, the longer I considered the matter, the less room for comfort I found. Certainly he was mad. We knew him to be mad. But how were we to persuade others? For weeks his bodily health had been good; he had carried himself indoors and out-of-doors like a sane man; he had done duty in the trenches, and mixed, though grudgingly, with his fellows, and gone about the ordinary business of life. How, in the face of all this, could we prove him mad, or make his judges, stern men, fighting with their backs to the wall, see the man as we saw him?
'I suppose that there will be a trial?' my lady said at last, breaking the silence.