er tall, spare figure and glowing eyes,
stoic and patriot. Once every month she burned four candles before the
shrine of Our Lady of Sorrows in the cathedral, because of four sons she
had given to her country.

On the evening of the day Hedwig had made her futile appeal to the King,
the Chancellor sat alone. His dinner, almost untasted, lay at his elbow.
It was nine o'clock. At something after seven he had paid his evening
visit to the King, and had found him uneasy and restless.

"Sit down;" the King had said. "I need steadying, old friend."

"Steadying, sire?"

"I have had a visit from Hedwig. Rather a stormy one, poor child." He
turned and fixed on his Chancellor his faded eyes. "In this course that
you have laid out, and that I am following, as I always have," irony
this, but some truth, too,--"have you no misgivings? You still think it
is the best thing?"

"It is the only thing."

"But all this haste," put in the King querulously.

"Is that so necessary? Hedwig begs for time. She hardly knows the man."

"Time! But I thought--" He hesitated. How say to a dying man that time
was the one thing he did not have?

"Another thing. She was incoherent, but I gathered that there was some
one else. The whole interview was cyclonic. It seems, however, that this
young protege of yours, Larisch, has been making love to her over Otto's
head."

Mettlich's face hardened, a gradual process, as the news penetrated in
all its significance.

"I should judge," the King went on relentlessly, "that this vaunted
affection of his for the boy is largely assumed, a cover for other
matters. But," he added, with a flicker of humor, "my granddaughter
assures me that it is she who has made the advances. I believe she asked
him to elope with her, and he refused!"

"A boy-and-girl affair, sire. He is loyal. And in all of this, you and I
are reckoning without Karl. The Princess hardly knows him, and naturally
she is terrified. But his approaching visit will make many changes. He
is a fine figure of a man, and women--"

"Exactly;" said the King dryly. What the Chancellor meant was that women
always had loved Karl, and the King understood.

"His wild days are over," bluntly observed the Chancellor. "He is forty,
sire."

"Aye," said the King. "And at forty, a bad man changes his nature, and
purifies himself in marriage! Nonsense, Karl will be as he has always
been. But we have gone into this before. Only, I am sorry for Hedwig.
Hild