Their lips met again in a passionate, fervent caress.
On her part she gazed up into his kind, loving eyes with a rapturous look which was more expressive than words—a look which told him plainly how deeply she still loved him, notwithstanding all the bitterness and injustice of the black, broken past.
Chapter Twenty Eight.
Conclusion.
The greatest flutter of excitement was caused throughout Germany—and throughout the whole of Europe, for the matter of that—when it became known through the press that the Queen of Marburg had returned.
Reuter’s correspondent at Treysa was the first to give the astounding news to the world, and the world at first shrugged its shoulders and grinned.
When, however, a few days later, it became known that the Minister Heinrich Hinckeldeym had been summarily dismissed from office, his decorations withdrawn, and he was under arrest for serious peculation from the Royal Treasury, people began to wonder. Their doubts were, however, quickly set at rest when the Ministers Stuhlmann and Hoepfner were also dismissed and disgraced, and a semi-official statement was published in the Government Gazette to the effect that the King had discovered that the charges against his wife were, from beginning to end, a tissue of false calumnies “invented by certain persons who sought to profit by her Majesty’s absence from Court.”
And so, by degrees, the reconciliation between the King and Queen gradually leaked out to the English public through the columns of their newspapers.