"Viscount, we'll shake on that. My girl's free to choose where she likes, or not to choose at all, and you are not going to have any help from me in the way of persuasion; but if she does choose, why, I'd sooner she chose you than any other man I know." "I ask for nothing better, I can assure you," said Hardress. "Thank you a thousand times." And so they shook. The next day by noon the _Nadine_ was steaming out past Sandy Hook. Allowing for difference in longitude, it was almost at the same moment that the night mail pulled out of the Petersburg station. Two of the sleeping-compartments were occupied by Prince Xavier de Condé and his daughter; and so, from the ends of the earth, both travelling towards an obscure little watering-place hidden away in the depths of the German forest land, were approaching each other the man and the woman whose destinies had been, all unknown to themselves, so strangely linked together by the last despairing act of the man whose country had refused to permit him to make her the mistress of the world. CHAPTER VII The village of Elsenau, which has hardly yet risen to the dignity of a town, lies somewhere midway between the Hartz Mountains and the Thuringia Wald, which, as everyone knows, stretches away in undulations of wooded uplands and valleys southward to the Black Forest. Its most recent possession is the fine Hôtel Wilhelmshof--an entirely admirable creation of the German instinct for catering, facing south-west, and sheltered north and east by uplands crowned with stately pines. Southward it has smooth, new-made lawns, dotted with clumps of firs and parterres of flowers, shielded by curves of flowering bushes. The lawns slope down to the edge of a long narrow lake, which, on the evening of the day after the prince and the marquise left Petersburg, lay smooth and blue-black beneath the cloudless azure of the summer heaven. But the principal attraction of Elsenau, which, indeed, had given the luxurious hotel its reason for existence, and which had raised the little village of charcoal-burners and woodcutters to the dignity of a Kur-anstalt, was a spring, accidentally discovered by an enterprising engineer who was looking among the mountains for a water-supply for the city of Ilmosheim, some three miles away to the south. The waters had a curious taste and a most unpleasant smell. Learned chemists and doctors analysed them, and reported that they contained ingredients which formed a sovereign remedy for gout and rheumatism--especially the hereditary form of the first. They were bottled and sent far and wide, and soon after their qualities had been duly appreciated and commented on by the medical press of Europe and America, the Hôtel Wilhelmshof rose, as it were, with the wave of the contractor's magic wand, hard by the little limestone grotto in which the spring had been discovered.