"I see," he said, "I have done something, but I have not done enough. I will accompany you to Weissheim--a unit of your force--and I will do my best to serve your cause. What has passed between us is nothing, must make no difference in our relations, is merely the burlesque conclusion of a burlesque compact. I thought I saw the working of Fate in the incensed gloom of the Chapel Royal. The next few weeks will prove me an idle visionary or a true seer." He paused. "Which do you wish me to prove?" She rose to her feet, opened her sable cloak, and disengaged a pearl brooch from her neck. Bending over him so that her breath swept his cheek, she fastened the trinket to the lapel of his green tunic, and finished his subjugation with a long look into his eyes. "A true seer," she answered. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO THE WAR ON THE WINE-SHOP Outside the confectioner's Gloria let down her veil again, and turned her steps towards the Neptunburg. Trafford, at her request, took the opposite direction. His habitually fierce features wore a grimmer look than ever,--for his brows were knit and his teeth set,--and there was a dangerous gleam in his grey eyes. He was the prey to a host of indefinable emotions, that worked his turbulent spirit to its most aggressive mood. Disappointment, a tinge of bitterness, coupled with a wild sense of intoxication,--caused by the Princess's last relenting act of grace,--had strung his fine nervous system to a point when it demanded violent action as the only possible relief. Had he been at Harvard he would have kindled a bonfire; had Karl been within a reasonable radius of his activity he would have headed a cutting-out expedition to capture that unhappy monarch. As it was, he walked fast, bending his steps unconsciously towards his hotel. The sky showed a pale blue between the lines of house-tops, for as usual the sun was having its morning duel with the white fog that haunts the streets of Weidenbruck at this period of the year. The sun was winning, too,--as it generally did for an hour or so,--and even causing the huge icicles that hung from the eaves to drip a little at their sharp and glistening extremities. But Trafford noted none of these things. "I am very ill or very much too well," he said to himself, in diagnosis of his own feverish unrest. "If I were an Elizabethan courtier I should write a sonnet; if I were an ordinary American I should play tennis or golf. Being neither, I am suffering the torments of a wild beast in a small cage; my brain is bursting from enforced inaction. Saunders, who is always right, calls me a madman, and to justify his opinion I shall probably break a shop window in about two minutes."