hat Jugendheit wronged you?"

"Positive? Have I eyes and ears? Have I not seen and read and heard?"
This time the duke struck the desk savagely. "Why do you always rouse me
in this fashion, Herbeck? You know how distasteful all this is to me."

"Your highness knows that I look only to the welfare of the country. In
the old days it was a foregone conclusion that this alliance was to be
formed. Now, you persist in averring that the late king was the chief
conspirator in abducting her serene highness, aided by Arnsberg, whose
successor I have the honor to be. I have never yet seen any proofs. You
have never yet produced them. Show me something which absolutely
convicts them, and I'll surrender."

"On your honor?"

"My word."

The grand duke struck the bell on the chancellor's desk.

"My secretary, and tell him to bring me the packet marked A. He will
understand."

The two men waited without speaking, each busy with thought. The duke
had been in his youth, and was still, a handsome man, splendidly set
up, healthy and vigorous, keen mentally, and whatever stubbornness he
possessed nicely balanced by common sense. He might have been guilty in
his youth of a few human peccadillos, but the kingly and princely
excesses which at that time were making the east side of the Rhine the
scandal of the world had in no wise sullied his name. Ehrenstein means
"stone of honor," and he had always carried the thought of this in his
heart. He was frank in his likes and dislikes, he hated secrets, and he
loved an opponent who engaged him in the open. Herbeck often labored
with him over this open manner, but the mind he sought to work upon was
as receptive to political hypocrisy as a wall of granite. It was this
extraordinary rectitude which made the duke so powerful an aid to
Bismarck in the days that followed. The Man of Iron needed this sort of
character as a cover and a buckler to his own duplicities.

Herbeck was an excellent foil. He was as silent and secretive as sand.
He moved, as it were, in circles, thus always eluding dangerous corners.
He was tall, angular, with a thin, immobile countenance, well guarded
by his gray eyes and straight lips. He was a born financier, with almost
limitless ambition, though only he himself knew how far this ambition
reached. He had not brought prosperity to Ehrenstein, but he had
fortified and bastioned it against extravagance, and this was probably
the larger feat of the two. He loved his count