He began hurriedly to assure her that the King had doubted his capacity
to bring the enterprise to a favourable issue, but that now he would
without doubt return. Cardinal Origo would tell her more upon that head
if she would be good enough to receive him at ten in the morning; and
while Wogan was yet speaking, a torch waved, and amongst that
close-pressed throng of faces below him in the street, one sprang to his
view with a remarkable distinctness, a face most menacing and
vindictive. It was the face of Harry Whittington. Just for a second it
shone out, angles and lines so clearly revealed that it was as though
the crowd had vanished, and that one contorted face glared alone at the
windows in a flare of hell-fire.
Clementina saw the face too, for she drew back instinctively within the
curtains of the window.
"The man at Peri," said she, in a whisper.
"Your Highness will pardon me," exclaimed Wogan, and he made a movement
towards the door. Then he stopped, hesitated for a second, and came
back. He had a question to put, as difficult perhaps as ever lips had to
frame.
"At Peri," he said in a stumbling voice, "I waked from a dream and saw
that man, bird-like and cunning, watching over the rim of the stairs. I
was dreaming that a star out of heaven stooped towards me, that a
woman's face shone out of the star's bright heart, that her lips deigned
to bend downwards to my earth. And I wonder, I wonder whether those
cunning eyes had cunning enough to interpret my dream."
And Clementina answered him simply,-"I think it very likely that they had so much skill;" and Wogan ran down
the stairs into the street. He forced his way through the crowd to the
point where Whittington's face had shown, but his hesitation, his
question, had consumed time. Whittington had vanished. Nor did he appear
again for some while in Bologna. Wogan searched for him high and low.
Here was another difficulty added to the reluctance of his King, the
pride of his Queen. Whittington had a piece of dangerous knowledge, and
could not be found. Wogan said nothing openly of the man's treachery,
though he kept very safely the paper in which that treachery was
confessed. But he did not cease from his search. He was still engaged
upon it when he received the summons from Cardinal Origo. He hurried to
the palace, wondering what new thing had befallen, and was at once
admitted to the Cardinal. It was no bad thing, at all events, as Wogan
could judge from the Cardinal's smiling face.