"Yes, dearest; but it all goes into your pocket, not mine. It is the price he pays for your character; that is all."
"But what has my character to do with him?"
"Your character, beloved," said the Prince, turning upon her an adoring gaze, "leaves him with no moment in which he can feel safe. He thinks that you have 'a great vitality,' but here not enough scope. And he seems that he cannot govern this country so long as you stay in it. I think him very wise. Shall I tell you what I did?"
"Well?"
"I made a bargain."
"About me?"
"Of course about you, beloved—for you; who else except would I bargain for? Besides was it about anything but your business that he and I were having to seek each other? Well, because you so frighten him now he pays rather more to get rid of you; and you, oh my dear heart's beloved, you will get more. That is all that your Fritz had to do yesterday—and he has done it. So now!"
And then, well pleased with himself, the practical Fritz let his romantic side appear again, and for two minutes or so he lived up to the sky-like blueness of his eyes and the childlike gentleness of his face, and because his heart was very full of love he talked his own native German, and not Jingalese any more.
And these two sides of him are here given so that the reader, if kindly anxious about Charlotte's future, may trouble about her no more; for when your idealist is also a very practical man of business he can, up to the capacity of his brain-power, go anywhere and do anything, and even in a land that is outside Baedeker will assuredly find his feet. Not for nothing had Prince Hans Fritz Otto of Schnapps-Wasser turned his bottled industry of home-waters into a company.
In tentative motherings of her gigantic babe, Charlotte had forgotten all about money and business affairs when once more the practical man in him came out of childish disguise to make an inquiry.