whether the two men had taken the wrong turning and gone that way by mistake; but neither at the one country-seat which stood in the neighbourhood, nor in any of the poor hamlets along the road, had anything been seen of them. The country-house belonged to Prince Valerian Pelenko, a cousin of the Prince of Dardania, and he himself, travelling to “Europe,” had passed through Klotsch with his attendants shortly after the carriage had started. He had not met it, for it would have passed the cross-road before his carriage turned into the main highway, and most certainly he had not met the missing men, for his attendants would have been sure to report at the posting-station the astonishing sight of two “European” gentlemen walking unattended along the road. Extraordinary as it seemed, there was no doubt that Count Mortimer and his secretary had disappeared as completely as though they had not been, and that the disappearance had taken place on the high road and almost in broad daylight. There were no signs of a struggle, and tentative suggestions of a landslip, or a fall over a steep place on the edge of the road, were scouted at once, for there was absolutely not the slightest indication of either. The English papers, taking up Count Mortimer’s cause with a vigour they had seldom displayed during his career, were drawing parallels between his disappearance and that of the unfortunate Mr Benjamin Bathurst in the early years of the nineteenth century, and hinting that as similar influences were in all probability at work, the fate of the one was likely to remain, like that of the other, an unsolved mystery. The Neustrian, Scythian, and Roumi papers, relying on the known antipathy of their respective Governments to the Pannonian occupation of the Illyrian Provinces, were urgent and eloquent in their representations that Pannonia had now conclusively proved herself unfitted to discharge her duties, since she could not even protect travellers on the high road. The Pannonian papers, unable to deny the facts, took refuge in the assertion that Count Mortimer’s disappearance was purely voluntary. For reasons of his own he had made up his mind to vanish, and he had done so, and who could be held responsible for the doings of a man whose pride it had always been to baffle and astonish the rest of Europe? This was the state of things at present. Queen Ernestine, in the deepest grief and anxiety, was at Novigrad, where Lord Caerleon had joined her as fast as steam could bring him from England, and they were making a comprehensive search throughout the whole district, aided by the best detectives that money could procure.