But Count Renenski never saw her again. On the eighth of July she told her hostess that she was going to drive into Posen to do some shopping, and as the old lady was indisposed she went alone. That night she took train to a remote German village, and with her travelled the family jewels of the Renenskis and the sum of three thousand pounds, most of which she had borrowed from the count's cousin.
It was some little time before the disappointed and enraged nobleman would confess that he had been swindled by as clever a German adventuress as had ever appeared in Poland, but it is doubtful if he ever learnt that Anna Schnieder had purposely planted herself on that seat in the park to wait until he came along, or that she had looked up his history and had discovered amongst other things that he was in the habit of taking a morning constitutional, and, knowing how generous and impulsive he was, had invented a yarn about an ill-treated Polish mother and a brutal German father, and, as the count's hatred of the Kaiser was common knowledge, she had not found it difficult to fool him.
He came to the conclusion that all the papers she had shown him were forgeries, but, as a matter of fact, only the certificates came under that head, for the letters from the Crown Prince were genuine enough, though the words he had used bore quite a different interpretation to that which Renenski had given them. Anna had been at one time a waitress in a certain Bonn beer-house where she had made the acquaintance of the Crown Prince, and had become one of his earliest friends. He had taken her about the country, and had even affronted Berlin society by appearing with her in a box at the Apollo Theatre, and drawing attention to both of them by shouting at the performers. The scandal had been reported to the Kaiser, who had ordered Police-President von Jagow to make short work of Anna, and the police had accordingly forcibly carried her away from the hotel where she was stopping, and had threatened her with imprisonment if ever she went near the prince again.
Anna had, of course, written to the Crown Prince, and he had in response sent her the two letters which she found so useful in her career as a brazen-faced adventuress. For the prince had regaled her with many stories of his father's escapades in the days when the present ex-Kaiser was a very young man, and Anna, being clever and unscrupulous, had treasured up memories of these anecdotes with a view to making use of them later.
Count Renenski made a guarded complaint to Berlin, and when the matter was referred back to Posen, and the German Chief of Police there called upon him to obtain fuller particulars, the count, having in the meantime remembered that he had pledged his word in writing to Anna that on their marriage he would start an anti-Prussian campaign, thought it more discreet to withdraw the charge, although by so doing he lost the only chance he had of recovering the very valuable Renenski family jewels.
By now Anna was at Homburg in the guise of a wealthy German baroness who had just lost her husband. She spent the count's money freely, and her jewellery was the talk of the place. She certainly looked exquisitely lovely in black, and her dainty youthfulness made her a welcome addition to the society of the famous German resort. It was impossible to imagine for a moment that such an innocent-looking being could utter a lie, and, as she had plenty of ready cash, there was never any suspicion that she was an adventuress.
Men were such fools where a pretty face was concerned! How she laughed as she recalled the count's love-making! But sometimes she sighed, too, because she knew that he would have made a good husband. Anna, however, had a husband already, a great, lumbering person with an enormous appetite, who followed the occupation of a brewer's drayman!
That was the reason why she had fled from Posen before the marriage day. She had often had reason to curse the mischance that had caused her when a village maiden to accept Ernst Rippelmayer, but she had not then known what she was capable of, and Rippelmayer owned his own cottage, and was considered a safe and steady man.
It happened that amongst the hotel guests was a Colonel Bernstorff, a distant relative of the late German Ambassador to the United States. He paid Anna some attention, because, having only a small income, he was desperately in need of financial reinforcements, having wasted the fortune his first wife had brought him.
In order to impress Anna, or the Baroness von Hotenfeld, as she called herself, he pretended to be very well off, and whenever she accompanied him to any entertainment he spent money with the freedom of a man who has more than he knows what to do with. They soon proceeded from the formally polite stage to the confidential, and before the Homburg season was over it was understood that they were engaged.