Evening was falling as we ran through the inhospitable region of sand and water and pine that engirdles Berlin.  We glided at diminished speed through the trim suburbs, skirted the city, on whose tall buildings the electric sky-signs were already beginning to twinkle, crashed heavily over a vast network of metals at some great terminus, then tore off again into the gathering darkness.  In a little, we slowed down again.  We were running through wooded country.  From the darkness ahead a lantern waved at us and the train stopped with a jerk at a little wayside station, a tiny box of an affair.  A tall, solid figure, wearing a spiked helmet and grey military great-coat, stood in solitary grandeur in the centre of the little platform, the wavering rays of a flickering gas lamp reflected in his brilliantly polished top-boots.

“Here we are at last!” said my companion.

I stepped out to meet my fate.

* * * * *

The young lieutenant was rigid at the salute before the figure on the platform.

I heard the end of a sentence as I alighted “... the gentleman I was to meet, Excellency!”

The other looked at me.  He was a big man with a crimson face.  He made no attempt at greeting, but said in a hoarse voice:  “Have the goodness to come with me.  The orderlies will attend to your things.”  And, with clinking spurs, he strode out through some big kind of anteroom, swathed in wrappings, into a yard beyond, where a big limousine was throbbing gently.

He stood aside to let me get in, then mounted himself, followed, rather to my surprise, by the young Count, whose responsibility for myself had ended, I imagined, on “delivering the goods.”  My surprise was of short duration, for once in the car the young Uhlan dropped all the formality he had displayed on the platform and addressed the elder officer as “papa.”  This, then, was old General von Boden, of whom the Major had spoken, Aide-de-Camp to the Kaiser and formerly tutor to the Crown Prince.

Father and son chatted in a desultory fashion across the car, and I took the opportunity of studying the old gentleman.  His face was of the most prodigious purple hue, and so highly polished that it continually caught the reflection of the small electric lamp in the roof.  Huge gold spectacles with glasses so thick that they distorted his eyes, straddled a great beak-like nose.  He had doffed his helmet and was mopping his brow, and I saw a high perfectly bald dome-like head, brilliantly polished and almost as red as his face.  He was clean shaven and by no means young, for the flesh hung in bags about his face.  Long years of the habit of command had left their mark in an imperiousness of manner which might easily yield to ruthlessness I judged.

“I thought I should have had orders before I left the Villa,” the General said to his son, “then you could have gone straight there.  I suppose he means to see him here:  that is why he wanted him brought to the Villa.  But he’s always the same:  he never can make up his mind.”  And he grunted.