Bending over the daïs in close conversation with the King was a man whom I had not observed there before. And that man’s was the face I had seen peering into the chapel window. The expression was altered now, but the face was the same, one never to be mistaken or forgotten, a face curiously striking in its suggestion of immense power and indomitable will, yet ugly almost to repulsiveness.
“Who is that?” I asked eagerly. “That man talking to the King?”
The girl looked at me curiously. “Surely you know him, at least by sight. No? Why, that is our great Chancellor, Graf von Rallenstein.”
CHAPTER IV
THE KING AND THE CHANCELLOR
I began to understand Von Lindheim’s disquietude; all the same, although the Chancellor’s system of espionage was pretty notorious, I did not quite see what my friend had to be so afraid of. True, I was an Englishman, and we know the aphorism; then he, too, was half English and a Rugby boy. Still, I suppose he counted as a native under the heel of the man known throughout Europe as the Red Chancellor, the man who never stood any nonsense.
“That Von Rallenstein?”
“And you really never saw him before?”
“Never before to-night; not even his photograph.”