Meyer nodded, as if appreciating the other's glibness.
"Would you think me very inquisitive," he went on, "if I asked at what hotel she will be staying in Vienna?"
"She is not going to a hotel," replied Trafford. "She is going to stay with my aunt,—my dear Aunt Martha,—whose address I cannot for a moment recall. I shall doubtless hear from her in a day or so, when I will communicate her whereabouts to you—if you particularly desire it."
"Please do not trouble," said the General, scrutinising his companion closely through his eye-glass. "But there is one further question I would put to you. How is it that Saunders does not even know that you have a sister?" Meyer's tones were of the blandest, but there was something in his look and bearing that bespoke suspicions that had become certainties. Trafford read danger in the mocking voice and smiling lips, and he grew wonderfully cool.
"That's dead easy!—she's only my half-sister," he replied. "We see little of each other. Saunders may well have never chanced to meet her or even hear of her. My half-sister, you know, detests men. In fact, my only fear of her going to Vienna is lest she should at once enter a nunnery and never be seen again."
Meyer dropped his eye-glass in a facial convulsion of admiration.
"Au revoir, Herr Trafford!" he said, with a gracious bow. "We meet at eight o'clock at the Palace to-night. But I am desolated at the idea of not seeing—your half-sister."
Shortly after the Commander-in-Chief's departure, Trafford donned his overcoat and sallied forth on foot to the Strafeburg. The beauty of the day was gone. The mist that had been dispelled by the noonday sun had settled down again on the city. The penetrating cold, born of a low temperature and a moisture-laden atmosphere, nipped and pinched the extremities, and ate its way behind muscles and joints till Trafford,—despite his warm coat,—was glad enough to reach the friendly shelter of the ancient prison-house. A half-krone procured him admission to the show-rooms of the famous building, and a young woman, angular of build and exceptionally tall, took him under her bony wing, and commenced to show him the objects of interest. Trafford had come to see something less forbidding than racks and thumb-screws, but for the moment the object of his visit being nowhere to be seen, he devoted a temporary interest to the quaint and sinister-looking objects displayed on all sides of him. These,—as has already been made clear,—were mainly the ingenious contrivements of filthy minds for the infliction of the utmost possible suffering on human beings. A judiciously-displayed assortment of racks, wheels, water-funnels, and other abominations, soon had the effect of making Trafford feel physically sick. Nor was his horror lessened by the custodian's monotonous and unemotional recital of the various uses to which the different pieces of mechanism could be put. And as his thoughts travelled back across the centuries to the time when men did devil's work of maiming and mutilating what was made in God's own image, a fearful fascination absorbed the American's mind, so that he quite forgot the Princess in a sort of frenzy of horror and wrathful mystification.
In the third room they visited,—a gaunt department of deeply-recessed windows and heavy cross-beams,—was an assortment of especially ferocious contrivements.
"This was used for those who made bad money," went on the long-limbed maiden, in her droning monotone, indicating a gigantic press which was capable of converting the human frame into the semblance of a pancake. "The coiner lay down here, and the weights were put on his chest——"