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 XIX

THE SILVER RING

T was late at night, and quiet reigned in Volseni—the quiet not of security, but of ordered vigilance. A light burned in every house; men lined the time-worn walls and camped in the market-place; there were scouts out on the road as far as Praslok. No news came from outside, and no news yet from the room in the guard-house where the wounded King lay. The street on which the room looked was empty, save for one man, who walked patiently up and down, smoking a cigar. Dunstanbury waited for Basil Williamson, who was in attendance on the King and was to pronounce to Volseni whether he could live or must die.

Dunstanbury had been glad that Basil could be of use, but for the rest he had listened to the story which Zerkovitch told him with an amused, rather contemptuous indifference—with an Englishman's wonder why other countries cannot manage their affairs better, and something of a traveller's pleasure at coming in for a bit of such vivid, almost blazing "local color" in the course of his journey. But whether Alexis reigned, or Sergius, mattered nothing to him, and, in his opinion, very little to anybody else.

Nor had he given much thought to the lady whose name figured so prominently in Zerkovitch's 267