With an air of reverence, Brasset inserted the letter with its portentous red seal in his cigar-case. The most exacting of ministers could not have desired a more trustworthy or a more eminently discreet custodian for an epoch-making document than the Master of the Crackanthorpe.
"How shall I know old von Thingamy when I see him?" inquired the messenger from the Foreign Office.
"You won't see him," said Fitz. "But you must make it appear that you want to see him particularly."
"But if I should happen to see him?"
The Master of the Crackanthorpe was awed into silence by a Napoleonic gesture.
"Where do I come in?" said the pleading voice from the wilderness.
"You come in, Vane-Anstruther," said Fitz to my relation by marriage, "four minutes after Brasset. You are Lieutenant von Wildengarth-Mergle from Blaenau, with a letter of introduction to the Illyrian Ambassador. Here is your card, and you can give it to anybody you like."
The recipient was immensely gratified by the card of Lieutenant von Wildengarth-Mergle of the Ninth Regiment of Hussars when it was bestowed upon him. His manner of disposing of it was precisely similar to that adopted by Brasset in the case of the letter from the Foreign Office. His bearing also was modelled obviously upon that of that ornament of high diplomacy.
"I assume," said I, "that we are all to bluff our way into the Illyrian Embassy; and once we are there we are to take care to stay until we are advised further?"
"That is so."