The passage ended abruptly in a stone door like that by which they had left the cave. Mansfield pushed it open, cautiously at first, for in the blinding glare of sunlight into which it admitted them they could not at once see where they were. Then came disappointment. True, they stood inside the circuit of the vast wall visible from the plain, but before them loomed the huge side of the palace, blank and windowless, built of immense blocks of bevelled stone. Travelling upwards from one course of Cyclopean masonry to another, the eye could discover no opening into the interior of the building until it reached the colonnade supported on columns which crowned the roof. Between the palace and the outer wall was a space of waste ground overgrown with coarse dry grass and low bushes, and Mansfield crept softly among the scattered rocks and fragments of carved stone, which lay everywhere around, towards the back of the building, and peered round the corner. “Nothing there but a few servants’ huts and attempts at gardening--certainly no door into the palace,” he whispered, returning. “Very well, we will try this way,” said Cyril, turning to the right, but here again was disappointment. The entrance to the palace was before them, indeed--a huge pillared portico with great stone doors; but these were as closely shut as the wooden gate facing them, which the angry lady had fastened behind her two days before. A small grated window above the door was the only opening here, and it was far beyond even Mansfield’s reach. But Cyril did not exhibit any sign of discouragement. “Take one,” he said, sitting down at the base of one of the columns and holding out his cigar-case. “There are only two left, but Sir Philip Sidney’s generosity was nothing to mine when there is anything to be gained by it. What I want to gain just now is an interview with the lady of the gateway, whom I take to be Princess Anna Mirkovics.” Mansfield obeyed, much puzzled, and they smoked in silence for some minutes. Then a female voice, speaking in German, broke the stillness. “Those servants again!” it said. “How often have I forbidden them to smoke in the neighbourhood of the Queen’s apartments! They know how much she dislikes the smell. Which of them can it be?” “Drawn!” whispered Cyril. “Though it is a little hard to have one’s best cigars mistaken for the stuff these fellows smoke, isn’t it?” “Markor! Zachary! Johannes! which of you is smoking out there?” cried the voice, which Mansfield recognised as that of the lady of the gateway, in Arabic, and her face appeared at the window. She recoiled precipitately when she saw Cyril, who bowed to her with the utmost politeness. “You here!” she cried, her eyes dilating as they had done before. “What do you want?” “An audience of her Majesty, mademoiselle.” “I thought so. I felt sure you would come cringing back to the woman you had wronged, but you shall not see her. I will not have her made miserable a second time by you.”