"Yes, your Highness!"
"Did you see him?"
"I did, your Highness! He is my old commander. He wearies for a renewal of his service!"
"Ah!" It was almost a sigh. "It will come again. It was but yesterday I had a message from him asking me to use my offices with the Emperor. He spoke of you and sent me a packet to give you."
There was a cabinet much inlaid with ivory, from Milan, as the pages had told him, which stood near by, and the Archduchess brought a little key from her chatelaine wallet and opened it, as if to show him the curious work within.
In one of the drawers which she pulled out was a leathern wallet. Nigel's eye fastened greedily upon it. For it was the wallet in which he had carried the despatches.
"It looks," said Nigel, "as if it and I, your Highness, were old acquaintances thrust apart by circumstance. May I look within?"
The Archduchess said, without any sign of interest, "It is for you, sir; open it."
Inside was the precious packet. Nigel could not restrain his eyes from glowing, his face from flushing, or his fingers from a little tremor. He turned it round. It was intact as he had lost it. The seal of Count Tilly was perfect.
"Your Highness is surely my good angel," he said gratefully, forgetting for the moment the old Ottilie von Thüringen in the new and glorious Archduchess Stephanie. "This that Wallenstein has sent me will justify my coming hither. Without it I had been dubbed, and rightly, a blundering knave, for your Highness should know I was robbed of it in a forest while I slept, and with two sentries on guard."