way.

Steinmetz returned to the large refreshment room, and ordered the waiter
to bring him a glass of Benedictine, which he drank slowly and
thoughtfully.

Then he went toward the large black stove which stands in the railway
restaurant at Tver. He opened the door with the point of his boot. The
wood was roaring and crackling within. He threw the handkerchief in and
closed the door.

"It is as well, mon prince," he muttered, "that I found this, and not
you."

CHAPTER III

DIPLOMATIC

"All that there is of the most brilliant and least truthful in Europe,"
M. Claude de Chauxville had said to a lady earlier in the evening,
apropos of the great gathering at the French Embassy, and the mot had
gone the round of the room.

In society a little mot will go a long way. M. le Baron de Chauxville
was, moreover, a manufacturer of mots. By calling he was attache to the
French Embassy in London; by profession he was an epigrammatist. That is
to say, he was a sort of social revolver. He went off if one touched him
conversationally, and like others among us, he frequently missed fire.

Of course, he had but little real respect for the truth. If one wishes
to be epigrammatic, one must relinquish the hope of being either
agreeable or veracious. M. de Chauxville did not really intend to convey
the idea that any of the persons assembled in the great guest chambers
of the French Embassy that evening were anything but what they seemed.

He could not surely imagine that Lady Mealhead--the beautiful spouse of
the seventh Earl Mealhead--was anything but what she seemed: namely, a
great lady. Of course, M. de Chauxville knew that Lady Mealhead had once
been the darling of the music-halls, and that a thousand hearts had
vociferously gone out to her from sixpenny and even threepenny galleries
when she answered to the name of Tiny Smalltoes. But then M. de
Chauxville knew as well as you and I--Lady Mealhead no doubt had told
him--that she was the daughter of a clergyman, and had chosen the stage
in preference to the school-room as a means of supporting her aged
mother. Whether M. de Chauxville believed this or not, it is not for us
to enquire. He certainly looked as if he believed it when Lady Mealhead
told him--and his expressive Gallic eyes waxed tender at the mention of
her mother, the relict of the late clergyman, whose name had somehow
been overlooked by Crockford. A Frenchman loves his mother--in the
abstract.

Nor coul