When one is standing in a window looking down into a gorge a thousand feet below, the cynical reflections of a mummy in bed smoking a cigar vex the impulse of romance, quick in the brain. Ranata was in the window. The window was Zrinyi’s; so was the perpendicular mountain of which the old border fortress might have been an abrupt continuation, so indeed were the harsh wild peaks, bare but for the glittering snow, which rose high above this lofty height. The mummy was Sarolta, who was in bed with a cold. The invasion of her sacred person by impertinent microbes always put her in a bad humor, and to-day it urged her to improve one of her rare solitudes with her royal charge. Moreover, she was profoundly puzzled. If Ranata was not in love with this American, why then did she show him a preference never before won, for a moment, by another admirer? But if she were in love, why then this serenity? She had expected that Ranata’s inevitable love episode would be fraught with tragedy from the very first, and that pallid cheeks and heavy eyes would be the visible signs, haughtily as the Princess might comport herself. Had the heroine been any one but Ranata she might have drawn a characteristic deduction from this serenity; but although she was not the European to swear to the virtue of any woman, she knew that Ranata, if not bigotedly virtuous, was bigotedly loyal to her house, and had long since made her vow that by no act of hers should another of its stones be loosened; rather was she exalted by the hope that it might be her destiny to save it from destruction. And Sarolta, who had settled back comfortably into her early doctrine that life was made to live, could have gone to the stake herself for the aristocratical or the monarchical ideal. Therefore, she believed that Ranata would immolate her passion on this altar the moment it burned too fiercely; and so, after all, was prepared to take her oath upon the virtue of one woman. Nevertheless, she was curious. Of the compact, of course, she knew nothing; and had she, still would she have puzzled, knowing the power and the will of woman to torment herself; but she had come to the conclusion that it was possible Ranata, never having seen Fessenden alone--this the good lady also believed--did not wholly realize her condition, would not until he left her; so determined to do what she could in the way of preliminary disenchantment.