"Ach! Herr Gott!" said the Councillor in alarm, "I cast no reflection, Your Excellency knows it! Only the woman is of light reputation——"
"And may be light-fingered into the bargain. Possibly—" said the Chancellor, "and all the better if she be so! We will risk my wife's family portraits in her vicinity until after dinner. Have coffee and liqueurs sent to her, and beg her to wait a while." He added, "Let them put cigarettes on the tray—I have no doubt she smokes tobacco. And as the smell will have passed off before my wife and daughter return from Varzin, neither of the ladies will ever know of the desecration of the red damask back drawing-room."
And as Bucher shuffled out of the room to execute his errand, his Chief rang the bell for the third course.
"By the way, Excellency," said the War Minister, as the demure servants out of livery removed the empty dishes: "that Frenchwoman of poor Max Valverden's is driving about Berlin."
"So!" commented the host, turning an inscrutable face upon the Minister. "She must find it very warm, and insufferably dull."
"She consoled herself," said Roon, "not long after Count Max's suicide."
"There," burst out the Field-Marshal, "was an incomprehensible catastrophe! That young man—who was military attaché at our Embassy in Paris until the return of the Allied Armies of Great Britain and France from the Crimea in 1856; and in 1866, ten years later, joined my staff in Austria as third aide-de-camp—I cannot understand it—he must have been demented!"
He unbuttoned the frock-coat, showing an unstarched, but scrupulously clean white shirt and vest of white nankeen, and taking a little silver snuff-box from his waistcoat pocket, laid it down carefully upon the tablecloth as he said:
"In '56 he brought his mistress from Paris with him—he was infatuated with her spirit and beauty. They said she was the wife of an officer in Grandguerrier's Division, who had served throughout the whole of the War in the Crimea."
"A chef d'escadron of Mounted Chausseurs, who seems to have taken his wife's desertion philosophically," commented the Chancellor.