audience that he had been instructed to postpone was advanced;
the king, whom he had been told to get away from Zenda, would not
go till he had seen Rischenheim. Still there are many ways of
preventing a meeting. Some are by fraud; these it is no injustice
to Sapt to say that he had tried; some are by force, and the
colonel was being driven to the conclusion that one of these must
be his resort.

"Though the king," he mused, with a grin, "will be furious if
anything happens to Rischenheim before he's told him about the
dogs."

Yet he fell to racking his brains to find a means by which the
count might be rendered incapable of performing the service so
desired by the king and of carrying out his own purpose in
seeking an audience. Nothing save assassination suggested itself
to the constable; a quarrel and a duel offered no security; and
Sapt was not Black Michael, and had no band of ruffians to join
him in an apparently unprovoked kidnapping of a distinguished
nobleman.

"I can think of nothing," muttered Sapt, rising from his chair
and moving across towards the window in search of the fresh air
that a man so often thinks will give him a fresh idea. He was in
his own quarters, that room of the new chateau which opens on to
the moat immediately to the right of the drawbridge as you face
the old castle; it was the room which Duke Michael had occupied,
and almost opposite to the spot where the great pipe had
connected the window of the king's dungeon with the waters of the
moat. The bridge was down now, for peaceful days had come to