oice as I could command:

'Your Highness, the mine flourishes, I trust?'

'It does; I think I may say it does,' he replied. 'There is always
the want of capital. What can be accomplished, in the present state of
affairs, your father performs, on the whole, well. You smile--but I mean
extraordinarily well. He has, with an accountant at his elbow, really
the genius of management. He serves me busily, and, I repeat, well. A
better employment for him than the direction of Court theatricals?'

'Undoubtedly it is.'

'Or than bestriding a bronze horse, personifying my good ancestor! Are
you acquainted with the Chancellor von Redwitz?'

'All I know of him, sir, is that he is fortunate to enjoy the particular
confidence of his master.'

'He has a long head. But, now, he is a disappointing man in action;
responsibility overturns him. He is the reverse of Roy, whose advice I
do not take, though I'm glad to set him running. Von Redwitz is in
the town. He shall call on you, and amuse an hour or so of your
convalescence.'

I confessed that I began to feel longings for society.

Prince Ernest was kind enough to quit me without unmasking. I had not
to learn that the simplest visits and observations of ruling princes
signify more than lies on the surface. Interests so highly personal as
theirs demand from them a decent insincerity.

Chancellor von Redwitz called on me, and amused me with secret anecdotes
of all the royal Houses of Germany, amusing chiefly through the
veneration he still entertained for them. The grave senior was doing his
utmost to divert one of my years. The immoralities of blue blood, like
the amours of the Gods, were to his mind tolerable, if not beneficial to
mankind, and he presumed I should find them toothsome. Nay, he besought
me to coincide in his excuses of a widely charming young archduchess,
for whom no estimable husband of a fitting rank could anywhere be
discovered, so she had to be bestowed upon an archducal imbecile; and
hence--and hence--Oh, certainly! Generous youth and benevolent age
joined hands of exoneration over her. The princess of Satteberg actually
married, under covert, a colonel of Uhlans at the age of seventeen;
the marriage was quashed, the colonel vanished, the princess became the
scandalous Duchess of Ilm-Ilm, and was surprised one infamous night in
the outer court of the castle by a soldier on guard, who dragged
her into the guard-room and unveiled her there, and would have been