With slow steps the Captain of the Guard advanced to the palace gates. He laid his hand on the huge key, but it would not budge. He put the point of his sword into the iron ring and used it as a lever, and with a raucous clang the bolt shot back. There was no need to do more. In a twinkling the twin gates were hurled open by the dense pressure of the closely-packed mob, and in a few seconds the stately courtyard was a mass of revolutionaries. The King and his late companions of the Rubensaal were separated from the Guard by the rush of incomers, but there was no attack made upon their person. For a moment even there was silence; perhaps the unexpectedness of the situation gave the rebels pause; perhaps the dignity of the royal presence shamed their violence. And, in that silence, Karl stepped forward as if to speak, but just at that moment there was a sudden cry of-- "Way there! way for the Queen Gloria!" and with a crack of a whip a sleigh drove through the open gates into the courtyard. The driver was George Trafford! In the body of the car sat the Princess Gloria, pale and softly weeping, but struggling bravely with her tears. On one side of her was Doctor Matti, and on the other Father Bernhardt. But there was something else in the sleigh, something that was neither man nor woman, and yet had the lineaments of a human being. The Iron Maiden had been taken from the captured Strafeburg, and was being borne in triumph to the home of its owner. Ever since the death of the late Archbishop,--and the spreading of the vile legend which ascribed his sudden demise to the embrace of the celebrated _Eisenmädchen_,--the thing had stood as the symbol of the cruelty and despotism of the twenty-second Karl. So when the tide of revolution had swept into the ancient prison-house, rude hands had plucked the maiden from her home, and set her on the sleigh with the leaders of their emancipation. The sleigh pulled up before the King.