What was it doing here?—and why so carefully preserved?—She looked at the writing more attentively—and suddenly one word stood out plain, even if inverted, and under it a date.
Instantly blotter and portfolio were replaced, and she hurried to her boudoir for a mirror. Laying it face upward on the desk, she held the writing over it. A single glance proved her surmise true. Here and there words and letters were missing or were very indistinct, but there could be no doubt that this was the blotter used by King Frederick when he wrote the decree the night before his death. Her hasty reading had found nothing to show the purport of the Law—indeed, it seemed to be only a few lines of the beginning and of the end, including the signature and date—but possibly a closer inspection would reveal more; and so she was about to copy it exactly, when she heard the Duke’s voice in the adjoining room and had time only to hide the mirror and to get the blotter to its place until he came in.
His cold face warmed, as it always did for her, and as it never had done for another woman, and he bowed to her in pleasant mockery.
“Good morning, Duchess,” he said; “what are your orders for the day?—you occupy the seat of authority.”
She got up. “Having no right to the title,” she said, giving him her most winning smile, “I vacate the seat—do you think I look like a duchess?”
“Like a duchess!” he exclaimed, handing her into the chair and leaning over the back, his head close to hers, “like a duchess! you are a duchess in everything but birth.”
“And title,” she added, with a bit of a shrug.
He stroked her soft black hair, with easy fingers.
“The title will be yours when Ferdinand of Lotzen reigns in Dornlitz,” he said.
She bent back her head and smiled into his eyes. It was the first time he had held out any promise as to her place in event of his becoming king, though she had tried repeatedly to draw him to it.