“Where?  I own a cattle ranch in Montana and since the Archduke’s death I have lived there.  He carried about fifty thousand pounds to America with him.  He took care that I should get what was left when he died—­and, I am almost afraid to tell you that I have actually augmented my inheritance!  Just before I left I bought a place in Virginia to be near Washington when I got tired of the ranch.”

“Washington!” snorted the count.  “In due course it will be the storm center of the world.”

“You read the wrong American newspapers,” laughed Armitage.

They were silent for a moment, in which each was busy with his own thoughts; then the count remarked, in as amiable a tone as he ever used: 

“Your French is first rate.  Do you speak English as well?”

“As readily as German, I think.  You may recall that I had an English tutor, and maybe I did not tell you in that interview at Paris that I had spent a year at Harvard University.”

“What the devil did you do that for?” growled Von Stroebel.

“From curiosity, or ambition, as you like.  I was in Cambridge at the law school for a year before the Archduke died.  That was three years ago.  I am twenty-eight, as you may remember.  I am detaining you; I have no wish to rake over the past; but I am sorry—­I am very sorry we can’t meet on some common ground.”

“I ask you to abandon this democratic nonsense and come back and make a man of yourself.  You might go far—­very far; but this democracy has hold of you like a disease.”

“What you ask is impossible.  It is just as impossible now as it was when we discussed it in Paris last year.  To sit down in Vienna and learn how to keep that leaning tower of an Empire from tumbling down like a stack of bricks—­it does not appeal to me.  You have spent a laborious life in defending a silly medieval tradition of government.  You are using all the apparatus of the modern world to perpetuate an ideal that is as old and dead as the Rameses dynasty.  Every time you use the telegraph to send orders in an emperor’s name you commit an anachronism.”

The count frowned and growled.

“Don’t talk to me like that.  It is not amusing.”

“No; it is not funny.  To see men like you fetching and carrying for dull kings, who would drop through the gallows or go to planting turnips without your brains—­it does not appeal to my sense of humor or to my imagination.”

“You put it coarsely,” remarked the old man grimly.  “I shall perhaps have a statue when I am gone.”

“Quite likely; and mobs will rendezvous in its shadow to march upon the royal palaces.  If I were coming back to Europe I should go in for something more interesting than furnishing brains for sickly kings.”

“I dare say!  Very likely you would persuade them to proclaim democracy and brotherhood everywhere.”

“On the other hand, I should become king myself.”