The competition for the King's Cup had no terror for Nervy Trafford, nor did the fact that he was lamentably short of practice affect his peace of mind. When a man has lost his heart's desire, has faced the barrel of his own revolver, the prospect of gyrating on skates before a critical audience becomes a matter of casual importance. When he left Harvard--to the vast regret of his fellow-undergraduates and the infinite relief of the much-enduring dean--he had not known in what direction to bend his superabundant energies. To one who had an innate craving for an electrically-charged atmosphere and the employment of explosives, and who was not of the dollar-hunting kind, office work was out of the question. So he had gone to Oxford. But sport there--the sport of the English shires--was too stereotyped and too little dangerous to appeal to his ardent spirit. Back again in the United States, he had commenced a military career, but it is a platitude that a soldier must learn to obey before he can command; and Trafford had stumbled badly on the lowest rung of the military ladder. After that he had wandered. He had seen men and cities, and had come to the conclusion that there was only one city, and in that city but one person. Whither that conclusion had led him we have already seen. Briefly, he was an unsettled and rather a dangerous person in such an inflammatory country as he was now visiting. It is little wonder, therefore, that the competition on the Rundsee caused him little anxiety, either as a trial of nerves or as a matter of vital importance in his cosmic outlook. The Rundsee, where the contest was to take place, was an artificial piece of water, circular of shape, situated in the Thiergarten, the public park on the outskirts of Weidenbruck. At half-past two in the afternoon its frozen surface was crowded with a vast number of human beings, who had come to see the great annual competition for the King's prize. On one side a big pavilion, garnished with small flags and red cloth, had been erected for the benefit of the King and the favoured few. The majority of the throng were crowded behind ropes, leaving a sufficient area for the evolutions of the competitors. There was no question of the ice bearing so great a crowd, for the ice of the Rundsee was as hard as a London pavement, and many times as thick. A battery of elephant guns would have traversed it without inflicting a crack on its adamantine surface. The scene was a gay one, for the winter sun had sucked up the morning mist and turned the dull grey sky to turquoise, and the snowy covering of the great trees into a bejewelled mantle of sparkling purity. A feeling of pent expectancy held the well-wrapped throng, a feeling which found outlet in rousing cheers when, with a cracking of whips and jingling of bells, a sleigh and four horses came rapidly down a broad avenue and halted at the back of the wooden pavilion.