The American duke himself behaved with a beautiful propriety. Publicly he took all the blame on his own shoulders, and hied him to the western wilds to scourge the campers and cigarette-smokers who infested his beloved forests. Thus congenially employed, he was quite willing to wait for Time's healing hand to do the rest. In a year he was completely reënameled, and took a finer polish than ever.
Mr. Ladd hoped that Phyllis would return to Carthage to hide her head from the storm. But she insisted on staying in Washington, and "seeing it through," which she did with the prettiest defiance imaginable, returning pin for pin with gay insouciance, and dancing the night out in all manner of lions' dens. In her veins there ran the blood of that old aristocratic South--of those fighting-cock Frenchmen, dark, lithe and graceful, who had loved, gambled and gone the pace with headlong recklessness and folly; of those fiery Spaniards, more grave and still more dissolute, to whom pride was the very breath of life, and who could call out a man and shoot him with the stateliest of courtesy.--What a race it had been in the heyday of its wildness and youth, the torment of women, the terror of men, alluring even now through the haze of by-gone pistol-smoke! And though it has been dead and gone these hundred and fifty years, the strain yet persists in some Phyllis here, some stripling there, attenuated perhaps, but far, far from lost.
Even to-day such intrepidity casts its spell. The eyes that are unafraid, the mouth that can smile in peril, do we not still admire their possessor--and that most of all in a young, high-bred and exceedingly attractive woman? Washington certainly did in Phyllis Ladd--young-man Washington, that is,--and they trooped after her in cohorts, and would have drunk champagne from her little slipper had she let them.
Months rolled by. The tide of Phyllis' letters rose in Mr. Ladd's drawer--countless pages in that fine girlish hand, full of zest, full of the joy of living, revealing, intimate, and silent only in regard to the most important matter of all--J. Whitlock's successor.
Mr. Ladd knew what value to set on her assertion that she was "tired of men." He waited, not without jealousy, for preference to show itself; reading and re-reading every allusion that might afford a clue. If she wrote that "the ambassador was a very kind old man, with aristocratic legs, and a profile like a horse, who singled me out for much more than my share of attention"--Mr. Ladd would forthwith look up that ambassador; get his diplomatic rating; and worry about his being sixty-six, and twice a widower.
One day, quite out of the sky, a card was brought him inscribed, "Captain Baron Sempft von Piller, First Attaché, Imperial German Embassy, Washington." As a rule, applicants to see Mr. Ladd had first to state their business, and undergo a certain amount of sifting before they were admitted. In this manner inventors were weeded out, cranks, people with a grievance against the claims' department, book-agents, labor-leaders, charity-mongers, bogus clergymen who had been refused half-rates--all that host who buzzed like mosquitoes outside Mr. Ladd's net. But the First Attaché of the Imperial German Embassy was given an open track, which he took with a military stride, and the clank of an invisible sword.
Mr. Ladd turned in his chair, and beheld a florid, tall, fine-looking young man of twenty-eight or so, with the stiff carriage of a Prussian officer, and unshrinking blue eyes that had been trained not to droop in the face of anything.
The captain wasted no time in preliminaries. In a carefully-rehearsed sentence, innocent of all punctuation, and delivered in a breath, he said: "It is not my intention to trespass overlong on the time of I know a much-engrossed gentleman but if you will kindly grant me three minutes I shall be happy to convince you of the integrity of my character and the honor of my intentions Mr. Ladd Sir."
Taking another breath that swelled out his magnificent chest at least four inches, he resumed: "This I now lay before you is my birth-certificate these are the reports on my gymnasium courses at Pootledam respectively marked good very good indifferent good very good till inspired by the thought of a military career I entered on probation subsequently made permanent by the vote of my fellow-officers the tenth regiment of Uhlans which after six years of honorable commendation I left regretted by every one to place myself in the diplomatic service Mr. Ladd Sir."
Taking a third breath, he went on: