Julien laughed, a little bitterly.
"My friend," he answered, stretching out his hand and taking a cigarette from the open box upon the table, "you ask rather a hard question. My resignation was accepted, was even required of me. Politics and diplomacy are alike barred to me. There is no return. What is there left? I may write a book. So far as my means permit, I may travel. I may play games, take a walk in the morning, play bridge in the afternoon, eat heavily and sleep early. What is there left, Herr Freudenberg—tell me of your wisdom—for a man about whose ears has come crashing the scaffolding of his life?"
Herr Freudenberg looked across at his companion, and in that dimly-lit room his eyes were bright and his lips firm.
"To rebuild, my friend," he declared. "Choose another foundation and rebuild."
"You recognize, I presume," Julien said, "that I require a few more details if your advice is to be of value?"
"The details are here in this room," Herr Freudenberg replied firmly. "Be my man. I cannot offer you fame, because fame comes only, nowadays, to the man who serves his own country. You see, I make no pretense at deceiving you, but I offer you a life of action, I offer you such wealth as your imagination can have conceived, and I offer you revenge."
"Revenge," Julien repeated, a little vaguely.
"Upon the political party by whose scheming that letter was first of all elicited from you and then made public," Herr Freudenberg said slowly. "Do you imagine that it was a thoughtless act of that woman's? Do you know that her reward is to be a peerage for her husband?"
"You, too, believe that it was a trap, then?" Julien remarked.
"Of course. Don't you know yourself that you were a thorn in the flesh to your own party? They hated you because you were not afraid to preach war when war might have saved your country from what is to come. They hated you because you were a strong man in a strong place, and because the people believed in you. They hated you because the policy which would have been yours in the four or five years to come, would have been the policy which would have brought the country around you, which alone would have kept your party in power. You were the only figure in politics which the imperialist party in England had to fear. Mrs. Carraby—I believe that was the lady's name—is ill-paid enough with that peerage. Leave out the personal element—or leave it in, if you will, for when I speak of my country I know no friendships—but, my dear friend, let me tell you that I myself would have given more than a peerage—I would have given a principality—to the person who threw you out of English politics."