CHAPTER XX.
THE PRISONER AND THE KING.
In order to a full understanding of what had occurred in the castle of Zenda it is necessary to supplement my account of what I myself saw and did on that night by relating briefly what I afterward learned from Fritz and from Mme. de Mauban. The story told by the latter explained clearly how it happened that the cry which I had arranged as a stratagem and a sham had come, in dreadful reality, before its time, and had thus, as it seemed at the moment, ruined our hopes, while in the end it favored them. The unhappy woman, fired, I believe, by a genuine attachment to the Duke of Strelsau, no less than by the dazzling prospects which a dominion over him opened before her eyes, had followed him at his request from Paris to Ruritania. He was a man of strong passions, but of stronger will, and his cool head ruled both. He
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