Clementina

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.