For a moment the older man studied the younger with an expression of surprise, then the sphinx-like gravity returned to his face.

“Your Majesty, may I inquire why the cap failed to explode?” he asked, with pardonable curiosity.

“Because”—­Karyl’s cheeks flushed hotly—­“an American gentleman, who had been here a few hours, intercepted the signal—­and reversed it.”

For an instant Von Ritz looked fixedly into the face of the King, then he bowed.

“In that case,” he commented, “there are various things to be done.”

CHAPTER XIV

COUNTESS AND CABINET NOIR JOIN FORCES

When Monsieur Francois Jusseret, the cleverest unattached ambassador of France’s Cabinet Noir, had first met the Countess Astaride, his sardonic eyes had twinkled dry appreciation.

This meeting had seemed to be the result of a chance introduction.  It had in reality been carefully designed by the French manipulator of underground wires.  Louis Delgado he already knew, and held in contempt, yet Louis was the only possible instrument for use in converting certain vague possibilities into definite realities.  Changing the nebulous into the concrete; shifting the dotted line of a frontier from here to there on a map; changing the likeness that adorned a coin or postage-stamp:  these were things to which Monsieur Jusseret lent himself with the same zest that actuates the hunting dog and makes his work also his passion.

If the vacillation of Louis Delgado could be complemented by the strong ambition of a woman, perhaps he might be almost as serviceable as though the strength were inherent.  And Paris knew that Louis worshiped at the shrine of the Countess Astaride.  The Countess was therefore worth inspecting.

The presentation occurred in Paris, when the Duke took his acquaintance to the charming apartments overlooking the Arc de Triomphe, where the lady poured tea for a small salon enlisted from that colony of ambitious and broken-hearted men and women who hold fanatically to the faith that some throne, occupied by another, should be their own.  Here with ceremony and stately etiquette foregathered Carlists and Bonapartists and exiled Dictators from South America.  Here one heard the gossip of large conspiracies that come to nothing; of revolutions that go no farther than talk.

In Paris the Duke Louis Delgado was nursing, with lukewarm indignation, wrath against his royal uncle of Galavia who had fixed upon him a sort of modified exile.

Louis had only a languid interest in the feud between his arm of the family and the reigning branch.  He would willingly enough have taken a scepter from the hand of any King-maker who proffered it, but he would certainly never, of his own incentive, have struck a blow for a throne.