"If you still refuse to tell me the truth, then I shall take my own measures to find out--severe measures! So I give you full warning," the Crown-Prince was declaring angrily, as I entered so unexpectedly. I did not withdraw, pretending not to notice the presence of a visitor, therefore His Highness himself beckoned the young man, who followed him down the corridor to another room. The whole affair was most puzzling. What had happened on that afternoon in the Harz Mountains I could not at all imagine. By what means had His Highness been rendered unconscious, and what part could the little old Countess have played in the curious affair? In about half an hour the Crown-Prince returned in a palpably bad humour, and, flinging himself into his chair, wrote a long letter, which he addressed to Countess von Kienitz. This he sealed carefully, and ordered me to take it at once to the Stulerstrasse and deliver it to her personally. "The Countess left for Stockholm this morning," I was informed by the bearded manservant. "She left by the eight o'clock train, and has already left Sassnitz by now." "When do you expect her to return?" The man did not know. On going back to His Highness and telling him of the Countess's departure, he bit his lip and then smiled grimly. "That infernal old woman has left Germany, and will never again put her foot upon our soil, Heltzendorff," he said. "You may open that letter. It will explain something which I know must have mystified you." I did so. And as I read what he had written I held my breath. Truly, it did explain much. Imposing the strictest silence upon me, the Crown-Prince then revealed how utterly he and the Crown-Princess had been misled, and how very narrowly he had escaped being the victim of a cunning plot to effect his death. The little old Countess von Kienitz had, it seemed, sworn to avenge the degradation and dismissal of her son, who had been in the famous Death's Head Hussars. She had secretly traced the Crown-Prince as author of a subtle conspiracy against him, the underlying motive being jealousy. With that end in view she had slowly wormed her way into His Highness's confidence, and introduced to him Karl Krahl, a neurotic young Saxon who lived in London, and who pretended he had unearthed a plot against the Kaiser himself.