“Gloria!” called Von Glauben. She looked up, smiling. “Has Majesty gone?” she asked. “Gone for the present,” replied the Professor, beginning to put one foot cautiously before the other down a roughly hewn stairway in the otherwise almost inaccessible cliff. “But, like the sun which is setting to-night, he will rise again to-morrow!” “Shall I come and help you down?” enquired the girl, turning on her elbow as she lay, and lifting her lovely face, radiant as a flower, towards him. “Whether down or up, you shall never help me, my princess!” he replied. “When I can neither climb nor fall without the assistance of a woman’s hand, I shall take a pistol and tell it to whisper in my ear--‘Good-bye, Heinrich Von Glauben! You are all up--finish--gone!’” Here, with a somewhat elephantine jump, he alighted beside her and threw himself on the warm sand with a deep sigh of mingled exhaustion and relief. “You would be very wicked to put a pistol to your ear,” said Gloria severely;--“It is only a coward who shoots himself!” “Ach so! And it is a brave man who shoots others! That is curious, is it not, princess? It is a little bit of man’s morality; but we have no time to discuss it now. We have something more serious to consider,--your husband!” She looked at him wonderingly. “My husband? Do you really think he will be very angry that the King saw me?” The Professor appeared to be considering the question; but in reality he was studying the exquisite delicacy of the face turned so wistfully upon him, and the lovely lines of the slim throat and rounded chin--“So beautiful a creature”--he was saying within himself--“And must she also suffer pain and disillusion like all the rest of her unfortunate sex!” Aloud he replied. “My princess, it is not for me to say he will be ‘angry,’--for how could he be angry with the one he loves to such adoration! He will be sorry and troubled--it will put him into a great difficulty! Ach!--a whole nest of difficulties!” “Why?” And Gloria’s eyes filled with sudden tears. “I would not grieve him for the world! I cannot understand why it should matter at all, even if the King does find out that he is married. Are the rules so strict for all the men who serve on board the Royal vessels?” Von Glauben bit his lips to hide an involuntary smile. But he answered her with quite a martinet air. “Yes, they are strict--very strict! Particularly so in the case of your husband. You see, my child--you do not perhaps quite understand--but he is a sort of superior officer on board; and in close personal attendance on the Crown Prince.” “He did not tell me that!” said the girl a little anxiously; “Yet surely it would not matter if he loses one place; can he not easily get another?” Von Glauben was looking at her with a grave, almost melancholy intentness.