. He must have been on good terms with the servants, for a
considerable time elapsed before they replied to my summons, and
when I asked them, each in turn, whether he had been seen, one and
all assumed the greatest astonishment and innocence, but none
appeared in any way alarmed, which they must have done had they not
been well aware of his presence in the house. I said no more, for,
by treating the matter lightly, I made them look--to
themselves--dupes and very ridiculous. I remained at the Villa
until the Archduchess and Lady Fitz Rewes departed for Paris. I had
a short interview with M. de Hausee in my character of the late
Archduke's Agent. Our conversation was purely in connection with
H.I.H.'s money matters, although he said with great firmness at the
close, "The Archduchess will never embarrass Alberian affairs. Her
taste is not for Courts or politics." I know this is his true
conviction, but he is in love, and he measures her by his own
unselfishness. He won my heart strangely. In all my experience, he
is the one honest man who is not a little idiotic into the bargain.
I deplore the influence of women on such a character, and I would
have saved him from that Judith.

Here, for the present, we must leave Mudara's narrative.

CHAPTER XVIII

The Alberian Ambassador, Prince d'Alchingen, considered himself a
diplomatist of the Metternich school. He had imagination,
sentimentality, and humour: he preferred to attack the strength rather
than the weaknesses of mankind, and in all his schemes he counted
inconsistency among the passions, and panic among the virtues. He still
hoped that Orange might be tempted by the prospect of immediate
happiness to press for the nullity of the Parflete marriage. Parflete
himself was indulging in the most extravagant demonstrations of remorse.
He behaved, as Disraeli said, more like a cunning woman than an able
man, and he was an agent of the kind most dangerous to his
employers--irregularly scrupulous, fond of boasting of his acquaintance
with princes and ministers, so vain that he would rather have had
notoriety without glory, than glory without notoriety. He had found the
means of ingratiating himself with many persons of high rank, and he
knew how to avail himself, with each, of his influence with the others.
Never did an intrigue require more urgently a sort of conduct quite out
of