"Will you not soon be occupying this seat en permanence?" Reitzei said, with affected nonchalance.
"Lind has abdicated, then, I presume," said Brand, coldly: this young man's manner had never been very grateful to him.
Reitzei sunk into the seat again, and twirled at his little black waxed mustache.
"Abdicated? No; not yet," he said with an air of indifference. "But if one were to be translated to a higher sphere?—there is a vacancy in the Council."
"Then he would have to live abroad," said Brand, quickly.
The younger man did not fail to observe his eagerness, and no doubt attributed it to a wrong cause. It was no sudden hope of succeeding to Lind's position that prompted the exclamation; it was the possibility of Natalie being carried away from England.
"He would have to live in the place called nowhere," said Reitzei, with a calm smile. "He would have to live in the dark—in the middle of the night—everywhere and nowhere at the same moment."
Brand was on the point of asking what would then become of Natalie, but he forbore. He changed the subject altogether.
"How is that mad Russian fellow getting on—Kirski? Still working?"
"Yes; at another kind of work. Calabressa has undertaken to turn his vehemence into a proper channel—to let off the steam, as it were, in another direction."