“I was just saying to his excellency, that you found yourself at home very readily in our little Court circle, my dear baroness.  You are entering our little society for the first time to-day, and have lived, no doubt, in a very different atmosphere until now.  Your name was—?”

“Stahlberg, your highness,” was the quiet reply.

“Oh, yes, I remember it now.  I have heard the name often enough.  It was well known, I believe—­in mercantile circles.”

“My dearest aunt, you must permit me to set you right in this matter,” interrupted Prince Egon, not wishing to lose an opportunity to anger his aunt.  “The Stahlberg manufacturies have a worldwide reputation, and are as celebrated across the ocean as here.  I had an opportunity, when I was in North Germany, to learn something about them, and can assure you that these works, with their iron foundries and enormous factories, their colony of officers and army of workmen, could absorb many a little principality, whose rulers have no such unlimited power as had the baroness’ father.”

The lady threw her princely nephew anything but a friendly glance; his interference was to her mind most uncalled for.

“Indeed!  I had no conception of such greatness,” said she innocently.  “I shall have to greet your excellency from this time forth as a great ruler.”

“Only as a regent of the empire, your highness,” answered the ambassador, seconding, a little apparently harmless joke.  “I am only my father-in-law’s executor, and guardian of my wife’s younger brother, who will assume the entire management of the works as soon as he reaches his majority.”

“Ah, indeed.  The son will have to learn to keep a watchful eye over his inheritance.  It is really astonishing to me to see what in these days can be accomplished by the energy of a single man.  It is all the more creditable, too, when he, like the father of our dear baroness here, springs from the people.  I think I heard that, but I may be mistaken!”

Princess Sophie knew well that the ambassador, with his old Prussian noble ancestry would find this rehearsal of his father-in-law’s station in life anything but pleasant, and it gave her great satisfaction to note that none of the little group who surrounded her, lost a word of the conversation, which was meant to humiliate the lovely new comer.  Baroness von Wallmoden drew herself up proudly as she replied: 

“Your highness has been correctly informed.  My father was of the people, and entered the capital a poor boy with no means whatever at his command.  He had many and great struggles, and worked for years as a simple artisan, before he could lay even the foundations for his great undertaking.”

“How proudly Frau von Wallmoden says that,” cried the princess laughing.  “O I love such childlike attachment, above everything.  And Herr Stahlberg—­or was it von Stahlberg?  The great industrial heads often get titles of nobility.”