It was of Baroness von Lynar that the Chancellor asked his question, and she fluttered a diamond-spangled fan to hide smiling lips, as she 111 answered, "What, Chancellor—are you in jest, or do you really not know?"
Count von Markstein turned his cold eyes from the two figures, so close together, moving rhythmically as poetry—to the face of the middle-aged beauty. Once he had admired her as much as it was in his nature to admire any woman; but that day was long past, and now such power as she had left over him was merely to excite a feeling of irritation.
"I do not often jest," he answered slowly.
"Ah, we all know that truly great men have seldom a sense of humour," purred the Baroness, who was by birth an Austrian, and loved laughter better than anything else in the word—except her vanishing beauty. "I should have remembered, and not tried your patience. 'That girl,' as you somewhat brusquely call her, is the English Miss de Courcy, whose mother has come to Salzbrück armed with such sheaves of introductions to us all. And she it is who yesterday saved the most valued life in the Empire. They are staying at the Hohenburgerhof; I thought you must have known."
"I did not see the young lady's face yesterday," returned the 112 Chancellor, whose indifference to women and merciless justice to both sexes alike had early earned him the sobriquet of "Iron Heart." "As for what this girl did, if it had not been she who intervened, it would have been another. It was merely by a chance that her arm struck up the weapon first."
"Do you not think, then, that His Majesty does right to single her out for so much honour?" Baroness von Lynar's eyes were on the dancers, yet that mysterious skill which some women have, enabled her to see the slightest change of expression on the Chancellor's square, lined countenance.
"His Majesty could not do otherwise," he replied. "An invitation to a ball; a dance or two; a call to pay his respects; a gentleman could not be less gracious. And His Majesty is a most chivalrous gentleman."
"He has had good training." This with a smile and the dainty ghost of a bow to the man who had been as a second father to Maximilian, when his own father had died. "But—we are old friends, Chancellor" (it had 113 not been her fault that they were not more, in the days before she was Baroness von Lynar); "do you really think it will end with an invitation, a dance, and a call? Look at the girl's face, and tell me that?"
Old "Iron Heart" frowned and glared, and wondered what he had seen twenty years ago to admire in this woman. He would have escaped if he could, but he would not be openly rude to the wife of the Grand Master of Ceremonies; and besides, he was willing perhaps to show the lady that her innuendoes were as the buzzing of a fly about his ears.
"I am half-way between sixty and seventy, and no longer a judge of a woman's attractions," he retorted. "Even were she Helen herself, the invitation, the dance, and the call—with the present of some jewelled souvenir, perhaps—are all that are permissible in the circumstances."