Sapt could do nothing but read it. He had taken to spectacles lately, and he spent a long while adjusting them and thinking what he should do if the message were not fit for the king’s ear. “Be quick, man, be quick!” urged the irritable king. Sapt had got the envelope open at last, and relief, mingled with perplexity, showed in his face. “Your Majesty guessed wonderfully well. Rischenheim can be here at eight to-morrow morning,” he said, looking up. “Capital!” cried the king. “He shall breakfast with me at nine, and I’ll have a ride after the boar when we’ve done our business. Now are you satisfied?” “Perfectly, sire,” said Sapt, biting his moustache. The king rose with a yawn, and bade the colonel good-night. “He must have some trick I don’t know with those dogs,” he remarked, as he went out. And “Damn the dogs!” cried Colonel Sapt the moment that the door was shut behind his Majesty. But the colonel was not a man to accept defeat easily. The audience that he had been instructed to postpone was advanced; the king, whom he had been told to get away from Zenda, would not go till he had seen Rischenheim. Still there are many ways of preventing a meeting. Some are by fraud; these it is no injustice to Sapt to say that he had tried; some are by force, and the colonel was being driven to the conclusion that one of these must be his resort. “Though the king,” he mused, with a grin, “will be furious if anything happens to Rischenheim before he’s told him about the dogs.” Yet he fell to racking his brains to find a means by which the count might be rendered incapable of performing the service so desired by the king and of carrying out his own purpose in seeking an audience. Nothing save assassination suggested itself to the constable; a quarrel and a duel offered no security; and Sapt was not Black Michael, and had no band of ruffians to join him in an apparently unprovoked kidnapping of a distinguished nobleman. “I can think of nothing,” muttered Sapt, rising from his chair and moving across towards the window in search of the fresh air that a man so often thinks will give him a fresh idea. He was in his own quarters, that room of the new chateau which opens on to the moat immediately to the right of the drawbridge as you face the old castle; it was the room which Duke Michael had occupied, and almost opposite to the spot where the great pipe had connected the window of the king’s dungeon with the waters of the moat. The bridge was down now, for peaceful days had come to Zenda; the pipe was gone, and the dungeon’s window, though still barred, was uncovered. The night was clear and fine, and the still water gleamed fitfully as the moon, half-full, escaped from or was hidden by passing clouds. Sapt stood staring out gloomily, beating his knuckles on the stone sill. The fresh air was there, but the fresh idea tarried.