“We are all friends,” she went on; “so it is safe to mention the Charity League, is it not?”
“No,” answered Steinmetz from the fire-place; “no, madame. There is only one friend to whom you may safely mention that.”
“Ah! Bad example!” exclaimed the countess playfully. “You are there! I did not see you enter. And who is that friend?”
“The fair lady who looks at you from your mirror,” replied Steinmetz, with a face of stone.
The countess laughed and shook her cap to one side.
“Well,” she said, “I can do no harm in talking of such things, as I know nothing of them. My poor husband—my poor mistaken Stipan—placed no confidence in his wife. And now he is in Siberia. I believe he works in a bootmaker’s shop. I pity the people who wear the boots; but perhaps he only puts in the laces. You hear, Paul? He placed no confidence in his wife, and now he is in Siberia. Let that be a warning to you—eh, princess? I hope he tells you everything.”
“Put not your trust in princesses,” said Steinmetz from the hearth-rug, where he was still warming his hands, for he had driven Maggie over. “It says so in the Bible.”
“Princes, profane one!” exclaimed the countess with a laugh—“princes, not princesses!”
“It may be so. I bow to your superior literary attainments,” replied Steinmetz, looking casually and significantly at a pile of yellow-backed foreign novels on a side-table.
“No,” the countess went on, addressing her conversation to Etta; “no, my husband—figure to yourself, princess—told me nothing. I never knew that he was implicated in this great scheme. I do not know now who else was concerned in it. It was all so sudden, so unexpected, so terrible. It appears that he kept the papers in this very house—in that room through there. It was his study—”