In thus providing against various contingencies she passed the waking hours of the night, and in the morning, when the train stopped at the station where her friend’s cousin lived, she felt that she was prepared for any event. The station-master’s residence was not imposing in appearance, consisting as it did of four whitewashed walls and a thatched roof, but the owner’s wife received her visitors with much hospitality, insisted on their sharing her breakfast, and supplied them with the means of making a hasty and somewhat primitive toilet. During the meal Nadia’s first friend unfolded the girl’s story, in so far as she had heard it, to her cousin, and engaged her help in the matter of drawing up the petition. The hostess wasted no time in assuring them of her sympathy, but produced at once a pen and ink and some sheets of official paper from a hole under the thatch, which served apparently as her husband’s bureau, and Nadia sat down to write at the small low table, from which the breakfast things had been hastily removed. It was no easy matter to translate into passable French the sonorous Thracian which her travelling companion poured forth, to the loudly expressed admiration of the station-master’s wife, and the latter complicated the matter almost at the beginning by exclaiming-- “Oh no, Maria! You must not mention the marriage, it would be most unsuitable. Haven’t you heard the news?” “News? What news?” cried Nadia and her friend together. “Why, about the poor King. The engine-driver on the train from Bellaviste which passed through the station this morning told my husband what he had heard them saying last night. The wicked girl--for wicked she is, princess or no princess--whom he was going to marry went and ran off with some one else on the very day before the betrothal!” “I wish her husband joy of her!” said Nadia’s friend, grimly. “A jilt like that will come to no good. After all, the poor young King is well rid of such a minx. But I was afraid you were going to say that something had happened to the King--and I see you were too,” she went on, looking at Nadia, from whose hand the pen had fallen. “That would have been bad for you; for Milos Drakovics, good patriot though he is, is a man of iron, and would never listen to a girl’s entreaties, especially on a matter that touched the discipline of the army. Well, we must alter the words of the petition. Perhaps the poor King’s heart will be softened by his trouble.”