I had heard him, but there was another question dinning in my ears so loudly that it drowned all other sounds—­“Who is Yolanda?”

Yolanda was entering the door of the House under the Wall less than five minutes before I saw the duke pass through the Postern.  Marcus Grote had told me there were but two openings to the castle, the Postern and the great gate on the other side of the castle by the donjon keep.  To reach the great gate one must pass out by Cambrai or the Somme Gate and go around the city walls—­an hour’s journey.

With an air of carelessness I asked Hymbercourt concerning the various entrances to the castle.  He confirmed what Grote had said.  Considering all the facts, I was forced to this conclusion:  If the Princess Mary had met the duke at the Postern, Yolanda was not the Princess Mary.

The next day I reconnoitred the premises, and again reached the conclusion that Yolanda could not have met the duke inside the Postern unless she were a witch with wings that could fly thither over the castle walls; ergo, she was not the princess.  With equal certainty she was not a burgher girl.

In seeking an identity that would fit her I groped among many absurd propositions.  Yolanda might be the duke’s ward, or she might be his daughter, though not bearing his name.  My brain was in a whirl.  If she were the princess, I wished to remain in Peronne to pursue the small advantage Max had assuredly gained in winning her favor.  The French marriage might miscarry.  But if she were not the princess, I could not get my Prince Max away from her dangerous neighborhood too quickly.  I could not, of course, say to Max, “You shall remain in Peronne,” or “You shall leave Peronne at once;” but my influence over him was great, and he trusted my fidelity, my love, and my ability to advise him rightly.  I had always given my advice carefully, but, above all, I had given him the only pleasurable moments he had ever known.  That, by the way, may have been the greatest good I could have offered him.

When Max was a child, the pleasure of his amusements was smothered by officialism.  My old Lord Aurbach, though gouty and stiff of joint, was eager to “run” his balls or his arrows, and old Sir Giles Butch could be caught so easily at tag or blind man’s buff that there was no sport for Max in doing it.  Everything the boy did was done by the heir of Styria, except on rare occasions when he and I stole away from the castle.  Then we were boys together, and then it was I earned his love and confidence.  At such times we used to leave the Hapsburg ancestry to care for itself and dumped Hapsburg dignity into the moat.  But the crowning good I had brought to him was this journey into the world.  The boy loathed the clinging dignities that made of him, at home, a royal automaton, tricked out in tarnished gold lace, faded velvets, and pompous airs.  He often spoke of the pleasures I had given him.  One evening at Grote’s inn I answered:—­