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"Look here, Bill," he cried, flourishing a newspaper before my eyes. "Look here, some one has got his deserts at last!" I took the paper from him and read the paragraph he pointed to; it was headed "Tragic Death of the Duke of Rittersheim." I paused, put down the newspaper, and looked at St. Nivel.
"As for solving the mystery of the old lady at Bath and her casket," I wrote, "whether she is alive or dead, and why she sent me to Valoro, all, my dear Jack, are to me at the present moment as great a mystery as the reason why His Serene Highness the Duke of Rittersheim should want to shoot me at a battue down in Norfolk!
Nivel the whole of the incident of the shooting of the beater by the Duke of Rittersheim. "Well, that's the limit," commented Jack, taking the cigar out of his mouth; "he must be a cool-headed scoundrel. I never heard of such nerve!" "It's a nice thing to have a brute like that on one's track, isn't it?" I remarked dejectedly; "it makes life hardly worth living."
"Yes," she continued, "Adalbert, the eldest son of the Grand Duke of Rittersheim, he who succeeded his father two years later. "The Prince was, I think, the handsomest man I have ever seen, and I think the wickedest. His tall fine presence, set off by a magnificent uniform, was seen at every Court I held.
"Yes," he said, interpreting my look; "you will be troubled with him no more in this world; he's dead. Read it and see." I took up the paper and read on "MUNICH, Tuesday. "Considerable consternation was caused this morning in the Castle of Rittersheim and its neighbourhood upon the fact becoming known that His Serene Highness the Duke had passed away during the night.
He told me it was the sight of my face in a picture, and the 'glamour of my virgin court, but I think rather it was the spirit of the adventurer, or the gamester, which seeks for gain and counts not the cost to others. The Prince of Rittersheim " "Rittersheim!" I exclaimed, interrupting her.
"Yes, of course," he said, turning again to me; "he is the Duke Rittersheim, one of those small German principalities swept away long ago, and of which only the title and the family estates remain." I turned and took another look at His Serene Highness.
"The letter to the latter, in which I told him I should come here if I lived, of course I placed in the ebony casket with something else that was worth more to me than all the diamonds in the world; it was the certificate of my marriage to Prince Adalbert of Rittersheim at the little church of the remote mountain village in Aquazilia. "I was far more fearful of losing that than all my fortune.
"Meanwhile, in the throes of a continental war, the Grand Duchy of Rittersheim was absorbed into the neighbouring great state, and the Grand Duke Adalbert, deposed and impoverished, became simply a pensioner, and a most importunate blackmailer of myself.
"From the very first, although he did not tell me so then, he saw that I had been simply exploited by this heartless and unprincipled scoundrel, Prince Adalbert of Rittersheim. But your father," she proceeded, turning to Dolores and placing her hand on hers, "your father, my dear, by his self-sacrifice and the pure affection which he bore me, saved me.
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