“If you wish,” replied Leopold at his haughtiest and coldest.
The old man unbuttoned his coat and produced a coroneted pocket-book, a souvenir of friendship on his last birthday from the Emperor. Leopold saw it, and remembered, as the Chancellor hoped he would.
“Here are the telegrams, your Majesty,” he said. “The first one is from the Crown Prince of Hungaria.”
“Have no idea where Lady Mowbray and daughter are traveling; may be Rhaetia or North Pole,” Adalbert had written with characteristic flippancy. “Have seen neither for eight years, and scarcely know them. But Lady M. tall brown old party with nose like hobbyhorse. Helen dark, nose like mother’s, wears glasses.”
With no betrayal of feeling, Leopold laid the telegram on the red plush seat, and unfolded the other.
“Pardon delay,” the Rhaetian ambassador’s message began. “Have been making inquiries. Lady Mowbray has been widow for ten years. Not rich. During son’s minority has let her town and country houses, lives much abroad. Very high church, intellectual, at present in Calcutta, where her daughter Helen, twenty-eight, not pretty, is lately engaged to marry middle-aged Judge of some distinction.”
“So!” And the Emperor threw aside the second bit of paper. “It is on such slight grounds as these that a man of the world can label two ladies ‘adventuresses’!”
The Chancellor was bitterly disappointed. He had counted on the impression which these telegrams must make, and unless Leopold were acting, it was now certain that love had driven him out of his senses.
But if the Emperor were mad, he must be treated accordingly, and the old statesman condescended to “bluff.”