s--events--if a man will watch and wait and
study events--"

"Bless me! They organize clubs in every American village for the study of
events," laughed Armitage; then he changed his tone. "To be sure, the
Bourbons have studied events these many years--a pretty spectacle, too."

"Carrion! Carrion!" almost screamed the old man, half-rising in his seat.
"Don't mention those scavengers to me! Bah! The very thought of them
makes me sick. But"--he gulped down more of the brandy--"where and how do
you live?"

"Where? I own a cattle ranch in Montana and since the Archduke's death I
have lived there. He carried about fifty thousand pounds to America with
him. He took care that I should get what was left when he died--and, I am
almost afraid to tell you that I have actually augmented my inheritance!
Just before I left I bought a place in Virginia to be near Washington
when I got tired of the ranch."

"Washington!" snorted the count. "In due course it will be the storm
center of the world."

"You read the wrong American newspapers," laughed Armitage.

They were silent for a moment, in which each was busy with his own
thoughts; then the count remarked, in as amiable a tone as he ever used:

"Your French is first rate. Do you speak English as well?"

"As readily as German, I think. You may recall that I had an English
tutor, and maybe I did not tell you in that interview at Paris that I had
spent a year at Harvard University."

"What the devil did you do that for?" growled Von Stroebel.

"From curiosity, or ambition, as you like. I was in Cambridge at the law
school for a year before the Archduke died. That was three years ago. I
am twenty-eight, as you may remember. I am detaining you; I have no wish
to rake over the past; but I am sorry--I am very sorry we can't meet on
some common ground."

"I ask you to abandon this democratic nonsense and come back and make a
man of yourself. You might go far--very far; but this democracy has hold
of you like a disease."

"What you ask is impossible. It is just as impossible now as it was when
we discussed it in Paris last year. To sit down in Vienna and learn how
to keep that leaning tower of an Empire from tumbling down like a stack
of bricks--it does not appeal to me. You have spent a laborious life in
defending a silly medieval tradition of government. You are using all the
apparatus of the modern world to perpetuate an ideal that is as old and
dead as the Rameses dynasty. Eve