on him. Halderschrodt, as you must
remember, was the third of his colossal name, a man without much genius
and conscious of the lack, obsessed with the idea of operating some
enormous coup, like the founder of his dynasty, something in which
foresight in international occurrence played a chief part. That idea was
his weakness, the defect of his mind, and she had played on that
weakness. I forget, I say, the details, if I ever heard them; they
concerned themselves with a dynastic revolution somewhere, a revolution
that was to cause a slump all over the world, and that had been
engineered in our Salon. And she had burked the revolution--betrayed it,
I suppose--and the consequences did not ensue, and Halderschrodt and all
the rest of them were left high and dry.

The whole thing was a matter of under-currents that never came to the
surface, a matter of shifting sands from which only those with the
clearest heads could come forth.

"And we ... we have clear heads," she said. It was impossible to listen
to her without shuddering. For me, if he stood for anything,
Halderschrodt stood for stability; there was the tremendous name, and
there was the person I had just seen, the person on whom a habit of mind
approaching almost to the royal had conferred a presence that had some
of the divinity that hedges a king. It seemed frightful merely to
imagine his ignominious collapse; as frightful as if she had pointed out
a splendid-limbed man and said: "That man will be dead in five minutes."
That, indeed, was what she said of Halderschrodt.... The man had saluted
her, going to his death; the austere inclination that I had seen had
been the salutation of such a man.

I was so moved by one thing and another that I hardly noticed that
Gurnard had come into the room. I had not seen him since the night when
he had dined with the Duc de Mersch at Churchill's, but he seemed so
part of the emotion, of the frame of mind, that he slid noiselessly
into the scene and hardly surprised me. I was called out of the
room--someone desired to see me, and I passed, without any transition of
feeling, into the presence of an entire stranger--a man who remains a
voice to me. He began to talk to me about the state of my aunt's health.
He said she was breaking up; that he begged respectfully to urge that I
would use my influence to take her back to London to consult Sir
James--I, perhaps, living in the house and not having known my aunt for
very long, migh