“Thank you. You have relieved my mind very much,” said Helene simply, but she returned into the house with slow, dragging steps. Was her mind relieved, or was it oppressed with a new and vague anxiety? Prince Shishman Pelenko had never been in the neighbourhood at all; his duel, his remorse, his flight from society, were all alike inventions of the Scythian Chancellor’s fertile brain. But if he had not been occupying the Pelenko mansion, then who was the recluse there, who never walked beyond the garden, whom no one in Drinitza had seen? Conviction forced itself upon Helene. The Princess of Dardania’s apparently purposeless display of Prince Valerian’s letter, the visit and the glib falsehoods of Prince Soudaroff, the strange hints of Tania Garanine--all pointed to one fact and one alone. Cyril was imprisoned down there in the Pelenko mansion, and Helene could take no steps to rescue him for a whole day. The idea was intolerable. She must at any rate try to find out whether she was right--and in a moment she saw how this might be done. Only once had she and Usk approached the great house closely in their walks, and then they had noticed a corner of the garden wall where a tree, growing against the masonry, had forced the lower courses out of position, and dislodged the upper stones. Usk had remarked that it was a standing invitation to burglars, and now she would play burglar. Her face was flushed with excitement when she entered her room again, and she gathered her paint-brushes together with shaking hands. She could think of nothing but her scheme, and did not at first perceive that Hannele was grumbling still. “Going out alone on the public terrace and speaking to two strangers--Englishmen, too, who have no reverence or good manners! That was not the way your august parents taught you to behave, Highness. And asking after a young rip of a Scythian captain as if life and death hung upon it! What’s Prince Shishman Pelenko to your Highness, I should like to know? I wonder what your noble husband will think when he hears?” This it was which reached Helene’s ears at last. She turned angrily upon the woman. “Silence, Hannele!” she said, with a decision Hannele had never seen in her before. “I justify myself to my husband, not to you.”