"Yes," she cried bitterly, "You refuse, of course, to look upon this piece of evidence! I now know why you went to Wiesbaden. The woman was singing there, and you gave her a pair of emerald and diamond earrings which you purchased from Vollgold in Unter den Linden. See! Here is the bill for them!"
And again she produced a slip of paper.
At this the Crown-Prince grew instantly furious, and, pale to the lips, he roundly abused his long-suffering wife, telling her quite frankly that, notwithstanding the fact that she might spy upon his movements, he should act exactly as his impulses dictated.
That scene was, indeed, a disgraceful one, ending in the poor woman, in a frantic paroxysm of despair, tearing off the splendid necklet of diamonds at her throat—his present to her on their marriage—and casting it full into his face.
Then, realizing that the scene had become too tragic, I took her small hand, and, with a word of sympathy, led her out of the room and along the corridor.
As I left her she burst into a sudden torrent of tears; yet when I returned again to the Crown-Prince I found his manner had entirely changed. He treated his wife's natural resentment and indignation as a huge joke, and it was then that His Imperial Highness declared to me:
"Cilli is a fool!"
That sunny afternoon the Crown-Prince had sprawled himself on the plush lounge of the smoking car as the train travelled upon that picturesque line between Genoa and the French frontier at Ventimiglia, the line which follows the coast for six hours. With the tideless sapphire Mediterranean lapping the yellow beach on the one side and high brown rocks upon the other, we went through Savona, Albenga, the old-world Porto Maurizio to the glaring modern town of San Remo and palm-embowered Bordighera, that beautiful Italian Riviera that you and I know so well.
"Listen, Heltzendorff," his Highness exclaimed suddenly between the whiffs of his cigarette. "In Nice I may disappear for a day or two. I may be missing. But if I am, please don't raise a fuss about it. I'm incognito, and nobody will know. I may be absent for seven days. If I am not back by that time then you may make inquiry."
"But the Commissary of Police Eckardt! He will surely know?" I remarked in surprise.