‘The reverse too, I hope,’ said Mr. Mattock, nodding and passing on his way.

‘That I am not so sure of,’ Con remarked to himself.  ’There’s a change in a man through a change in his position!  Six months or so back, Phil, that man came from Vienna, the devoted slave of the Princess Nikolas.  He’d been there on his father’s business about one of the Danube railways, and he was ready to fill the place of the prince at the head of his phantom body of horse and foot and elsewhere.  We talked of his selling her estates for the purchase of arms and the enemy—­as many as she had money for.  We discussed it as a matter of business.  She had bewitched him:  and would again, I don’t doubt, if she were here to repeat the dose.  But in the interim his father dies, he inherits; and he enters Parliament, and now, mind you, the man who solemnly calculated her chances and speculates on the transmission of rifled arms of the best manufacture and latest invention by his yacht and with his loads of rails, under the noses of the authorities, like a master rebel, and a chivalrous gentleman to boot, pooh poohs the whole affair.  You saw him.  Grave as an owl, the dead contrary of his former self!’

‘I thought I heard you approve him,’ said Philip.

’And I do.  But the poor girl has ordered her estates to be sold to cast the die, and I ’m taking the view of her disappointment, for she believes he can do anything; and if I know the witch, her sole comfort lying in the straw is the prospect of a bloody venture for a throne.  The truth is, to my thinking, it’s the only thing she has to help her to stomach her husband.’

‘But it’s rank idiocy to suppose she can smuggle cannon!’ cried Philip.

’But that man Mattock’s not an idiot and he thought she could.  And it ’s proof he was under a spell.  She can work one.’

‘The country hasn’t a port.’

’Round the Euxine and up the Danube, with the British flag at the stern.  I could rather enjoy the adventure.  And her prince is called for.  He’s promised a good reception when he drops down the river, they say.  A bit of a scrimmage on the landing-pier may be, and the first field or two, and then he sits himself, and he waits his turn.  The people change their sovereigns as rapidly as a London purse.  Two pieces of artillery and two or three hundred men and a trumpet alter the face of the land there.  Sometimes a trumpet blown by impudence does it alone.  They’re enthusiastic for any new prince.  He’s their Weekly Journal or Monthly Magazine.  Let them make acquaintance with Adiante Adister, I’d not swear she wouldn’t lay fast hold of them.’

Philip signalled to his driver, and Captain Con sang out his dinner-hour for a reminder to punctuality, thoughtful of the feelings of his wife.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: