ght do harm. I will take the
responsibility."

And John Armitage made a memorandum in his notebook:

"_Zmai_--; _travels as Peter Ludovic_."

Armitage carried the envelope which he had cut from Chauvenet's coat
pinned into an inner pocket of his waistcoat, and since boarding the
_King Edward _he had examined it twice daily to see that it was intact.
The three red wax seals were in blank, replacing those of like size that
had originally been affixed to the envelope; and at once after the attack
on the dark deck he opened the packet and examined the papers--some
half-dozen sheets of thin linen, written in a clerk's clear hand in
black ink. There had been no mistake in the matter; the packet which
Chauvenet had purloined from the old prime minister at Vienna had come
again into Armitage's hands. He was daily tempted to destroy it and
cast it in bits to the sea winds; but he was deterred by the remembrance
of his last interview with the old prime minister.

"Do something for Austria--something for the Empire." These phrases
repeated themselves over and over again in his mind until they rose and
fell with the cadence of the high, wavering voice of the Cardinal
Archbishop of Vienna as he chanted the mass of requiem for Count
Ferdinand von Stroebel.

CHAPTER VIII

"THE KING IS DEAD; LONG LIVE THE KING"

Low he lies, yet high and great
Looms he, lying thus in state.--
How exalted o'er ye when
Dead, my lords and gentlemen!

--James Whitcomb Riley.

John Armitage lingered in New York for a week, not to press the
Claibornes too closely, then went to Washington. He wrote himself down on
the register of the New American as John Armitage, Cinch Tight, Montana,
and took a suite of rooms high up, with an outlook that swept
Pennsylvania Avenue. It was on the evening of a bright April day that he
thus established himself; and after he had unpacked his belongings he
stood long at the window and watched the lights leap out of the dusk over
the city. He was in Washington because Shirley Claiborne lived there, and
he knew that even if he wished to do so he could no longer throw an
air of inadvertence into his meetings with her. He had been very lonely
in those days when he first saw her abroad; the sight of her had lifted
his mood of depression; and now, after those enchanted hours at sea, his
coming to Washington had been inevitable.

Many things passed through his mind as he stood at the open window. His
life, he fel