* * * * *

The grand duke had a warm place in his heart for the diplomatic corps.  He liked to see them gathered round his table, their uniforms glittering with orders and decorations.  It was always a night of wits; and he sprang a hundred traps for comedy’s sake, but these astonishing linguists seldom if ever blundered into one of them.  They were eternally vigilant.  It was no trifling matter to swing the thought from German into French or Italian or Hungarian; but they were seasoned veterans in the game, all save Carmichael, who spoke only French and German fluently.  The duke, however, never tried needlessly to embarrass him.  He admired Carmichael’s mental agility.  Never he thrust so keenly that the American was found lacking in an effective though simple parry.

“Your highness must recollect that I am not familiar with that tongue.”

“Pardon me, Herr Captain!”

But there was always a twinkle in the ducal eye and an answering smile in the consul’s.

The somber black of Carmichael’s evening dress stood out conspicuously among the blue and green and red uniforms.  Etiquette compelled him to wear silk stockings, but that was the single concession on his part.  He wore no orders.  An order of the third or fourth class held no allurement.  Nothing less than the Golden Fleece would have interested him, and the grand duke himself could not boast of this rare and distinguished order.  In truth, Carmichael coveted nothing but a medal for valor, and his own country had not yet come to recognize the usefulness of such a distinction.

All round him sat ministers or ambassadors; he alone represented a consulate.  So his place at the table was honorary rather than diplomatic.  It was his lively humorous personality the grand duke admired, not his representations.

The duke sat at the head of the table and her serene highness at the foot; and it was by the force of his brilliant wit that the princess did not hold in perpetuity the court at her end of the table.  For a German princess of that time she was highly accomplished; she was ardent, whimsical, with a flashing mentality which rounded out and perfected her physical loveliness.  Above and beyond all this, she had suffered, she had felt the pangs of poverty, the smart of unrecognized merit; she had been one of the people, and her sympathies would always be with them, for she knew what those about her only vaguely knew, the patience, the unmurmuring bravery of the poor.  Never would she become sated with power so long as it gave her the right to aid the people.  Never a new tax was levied that she did not lighten it in some manner; never an oppressive law was promulgated that she did not soften its severity.  And so the populace loved her, for it did not take the people long to find out what she was trying to do for them.  And perhaps they loved her because she had lived the greater part of her young life as one of them.