“Your highness knows that I look only to the welfare of the country.  In the old days it was a foregone conclusion that this alliance was to be formed.  Now, you persist in averring that the late king was the chief conspirator in abducting her serene highness, aided by Arnsberg, whose successor I have the honor to be.  I have never yet seen any proofs.  You have never yet produced them.  Show me something which absolutely convicts them, and I’ll surrender.”

“On your honor?”

“My word.”

The grand duke struck the bell on the chancellor’s desk.

“My secretary, and tell him to bring me the packet marked A. He will understand.”

The two men waited without speaking, each busy with thought.  The duke had been in his youth, and was still, a handsome man, splendidly set up, healthy and vigorous, keen mentally, and whatever stubbornness he possessed nicely balanced by common sense.  He might have been guilty in his youth of a few human peccadillos, but the kingly and princely excesses which at that time were making the east side of the Rhine the scandal of the world had in no wise sullied his name.  Ehrenstein means “stone of honor,” and he had always carried the thought of this in his heart.  He was frank in his likes and dislikes, he hated secrets, and he loved an opponent who engaged him in the open.  Herbeck often labored with him over this open manner, but the mind he sought to work upon was as receptive to political hypocrisy as a wall of granite.  It was this extraordinary rectitude which made the duke so powerful an aid to Bismarck in the days that followed.  The Man of Iron needed this sort of character as a cover and a buckler to his own duplicities.

Herbeck was an excellent foil.  He was as silent and secretive as sand.  He moved, as it were, in circles, thus always eluding dangerous corners.  He was tall, angular, with a thin, immobile countenance, well guarded by his gray eyes and straight lips.  He was a born financier, with almost limitless ambition, though only he himself knew how far this ambition reached.  He had not brought prosperity to Ehrenstein, but he had fortified and bastioned it against extravagance, and this was probably the larger feat of the two.  He loved his country, and brooded over it as a mother broods over her child.  Twice had he saved Ehrenstein from the drag-net of war, and with honor.  So he was admired by fathers and revered by mothers.

The secretary came in and laid a thin packet of papers on the chancellor’s desk.  “It was the packet A, your Highness?”—­his hand still resting upon the documents.

“Yes.  You may go.”

The secretary bowed and withdrew.

The duke stirred the papers angrily, took one of them and spread it out with a rasp.

“Look at that.  Whose writing, I ask?”

Herbeck adjusted his glasses and scrutinized the slanting hieroglyphics.  He ran over it several times.  At length he opened a drawer in his desk, sorted some papers, and brought out a yellow letter.  This he laid down beside the other.