"Admirably put!" cried the Grand Duke. "We will execute it, then, the first thing in the morning."
"—and, besides, one could take only a portmanteau—"
"And the capacity of a portmanteau is limited," his Highness agreed. "Nay, I can assure you, after I had packed my coronet this evening there was hardly room for a change of linen. And I found it necessary to choose between the sceptre and a tooth-brush."
"Ah, Highness" sighed the Baroness von Altenburg, "will you never be serious? You plan to throw away a duchy, and in the act you jest like a school-boy."
"Ma foi!" retorted the Grand Duke, and looked out upon the moonlit gardens; "as a loyal Noumarian, should I not rejoice at the good-fortune which is about to befall my country? Nay, Amalia, morality demands my abdication," he added, virtuously, "and for this once morality and I are in complete accord."
The Baroness von Altenburg was not disposed to argue the singularity of any such agreement, the while that she considered Louis de Soyecourt's latest scheme.
He had, as prologue to its elucidation, conducted the Baroness into the summer-house that his grandfather, good Duke Augustus, erected in the Gardens of Breschau, close to the Fountain of the Naiads, and had en tête-à-tête explained his notion. There were post-horses in Noumaria; there was also an unobstructed road that led you to Vienna, and thence to the world outside; and he proposed, in short, to quiet the grumbling of the discontented Noumarians by a second, and this time a final, vanishment from office and the general eye. He submitted that the Baroness, as a patriot, could not fail to weigh the inestimable benefit which would thus accrue to her native land.
Yet he stipulated that his exit from public life should be made in company with the latest lady on whom he had bestowed his variable affections; and remembering this proviso, the Baroness, without exactly encouraging or disencouraging his scheme, was at least not prone to insist on coupling him with morality.
She contented herself with a truism. "Indeed, your Highness, the example you set your subjects is atrocious."
"And yet they complain!" said the Grand Duke,—"though I swear to you I have always done the things I ought not to have done, and have left unread the papers I have signed. What more, in reason, can one ask of a grand duke?"