In any case, he did insist; and Countess Marie yielded to his entreaties. The allegation has been made that he offered her a pecuniary inducement to do so; but there is no reason for believing that. It would have been worth his while; but it can hardly have been necessary. So she found a pretext, drove Mary to the Hofburg, and left her there. “I want,” Rudolph said, “to keep Mary with me for two days, in order to come to an easy understanding with the Baroness over her.” He also said, alluding to the political trouble: “A great deal may happen in two days, and I want Mary to be with me”—for what reason (seeing that, according to the same narrator, he had spoken of Mary as a woman who refused to be shaken off) we are left to guess. And so Mary was whisked away to Meyerling; whence the telegraph presently sped the first intimation of the famous and mysterious tragedy. CHAPTER XXI What the Archduchess Stéphanie knew—What Rudolph knew that she knew—The search for Mary Vetsera by her relatives—The news of the Meyerling tragedy—The two official versions—The many unofficial versions—The attempt to hush the matter up—Mary Vetsera’s letter to Countess Marie Larisch. Meyerling was Rudolph’s hunting-box in the forest, not many miles from Vienna: a hunting-box not used for purposes of sport alone. The Crown Prince had his boon companions, as well as his artistic and intellectual friends; and he used to revel and drink deep with them in this secluded and beautiful resort. It was also whispered that his hunting-box was his Parc-aux-Cerfs: the place, at all events, at which he made romantic assignations. Rumour credited him with a good many of these: assignations with society ladies, assignations with gamekeepers’ daughters, &c., &c. It may be, of course, that rumour exaggerated, but there certainly was fire as well as smoke. Stéphanie had been taken to Meyerling, and had admired its beauties. “What a lovely place to live in!” she had exclaimed. “Yes, and what a lovely place to die in!” Rudolph had replied, speaking morbidly, but without any deliberately ominous intention. That in the course of the honeymoon, and before estrangement had begun; but estrangement had come quickly, and had continued without intermission. Rudolph complained that the love-light had never shone in Stéphanie’s eyes; but it does not seem that he tried very hard or very long to kindle it. Those eyes, he confided to a friend, “seemed incapable of expressing any feelings save those of wariness and suspicion”; and the time came when Stéphanie, as little in love with him as he with her, but more obedient to duty, not only suspected, but knew.