"I will not keep it waiting long," said "Iron Heart." "Have I your indulgence to speak frankly, not wholly as a servant of the Emperor to his master, but as man to man—an old man to a young one?"
"I would have you speak in no other way," answered Maximilian; but he 224 uttered the words with a certain constraint, and the softness died out of his eyes.
"I have had a letter from Friedrich, the Crown Prince of Abruzzia. It has come to his ears that there is a reason for your Imperial Majesty's delay in following up the first overtures for an alliance with his family. Gossip has told him that Your Majesty's affections have become otherwise engaged, and he has written to me as a friend, asking me to contradict or confirm the rumour."
"I am not sure that negotiations had progressed far enough in that matter to give him the right of inquiry," said Maximilian, flushing.
The old man spread out his hands—the pathetic hands of age—in a deprecatory gesture. "I fear, in my zeal for Your Majesty's welfare and the welfare of Rhaetia, I somewhat exceeded my instructions," he confessed. "My one excuse is, that I believed your mind to be entirely made up. I still believe so. I would listen to no one who told me 225 otherwise. And I will inform Friedrich that——"
"You must even get yourself and me out of the scrape as gracefully as you can, since you admit you got us into it," broke in the Emperor, sinfully glad of the chance to transfer a fraction of the blame to other shoulders. "If Princess Sylvia of Eltzburg-Neuwald is as charming as she is said to be, her only difficulty will be to choose a husband, not to get one. For once gossip has told the truth, and I would not pay the Princess so poor a compliment as to ask for her hand when my heart is irrevocably given to another woman."
"It is of that other I would speak with you also, Your Majesty. Gossip has named her. May I do the same?"
"I will save you the trouble, Chancellor," retorted Maximilian, "for I am not ashamed that at last the common fate of all has overtaken me—common, because they say every man loves once before he dies; yet uncommon, because no man ever loved such a woman. There is no one in the world like Miss de Courcy—the English lady who saved my life on 226 the eve of my birthday, as you know."
"It is natural that you should feel grateful, Your Majesty."
"It is natural that I should feel love; impossible that I should not feel it."