He swiftly walked towards Via Nationale; and she followed him. As he came into the more brilliant light, he drew the fold of his cloak closer across his mouth. That act decided her. She knew that her Georgie abhorred from every kind of muffling. That he should muffle now was natural enough. He did not wish to be recognised. He was incognito, for an evil purpose. That he should have chosen openly to walk through the biggest street in Rome, when he might have sneaked down bye-ways, or might have taken a cab, only added to the evidence. Her Georgie was the most frantically daring of men, she knew. Precaution on the one hand, nullified by extreme audacity on the other, she had noted in him before. She nearly lost him as he made his way by the Austrian Embassy and the Gesù into Corso Vittorio Emanuele. At the Oratory he crossed and went by the little Piazza into Banchi, where he left a card with the porter of the Palazzo Attendolo. Again, he muffled his face and went on, crossing the temporary bridge, and going by Borgo Vecchio straight to the gate of the Vatican. Here, he was admitted; and Mrs. Crowe was left alone in agony and in hilarity. She turned-out of the Colonnade into the square cursing herself for not speaking to him, writhing because she had caught her loved one secretly visiting another woman. Then she laughed at the thought that she had found His Holiness the Pope engaged in vulgar intrigue. The barb of the one emotion lacerated her. The barb of the other she would save to dilacerate Him. CHAPTER XII On the night of the second of October, the German Emperor sat in the Imperial box at the Berlin Schauspielhaus. They were playing _Wilhelm Tell_. William II. looked-on at the mummer pourtraying the audacious genius who, by skill and courage, delivered a people from tyranny. He looked on the presented incident with a humorous sense of its coincidence with his present intention: for, in the imperial mind--that agile predominant mind at which inferior minds (led by the _Pall Mall Gazette_) were used to mock--was stored certain knowledge of another scene yet to be enacted in which he himself would play the part of the deliverer. An aide-de-camp entered during the interval, while the house gave itself up to conversation, apples, nuts, pfefferkuchen. He handed a locked portfolio to the Kaiser. "The papers are all here?" "Yes, Sire." "The manager attends?" "He is at the door, Sire." "He has received my commands?" "Your Majesty's commands have been executed." "Good. I will follow him. Go now to the newspaper-offices; and bring the specials to me after supper. Mahlzeit!"