lickering 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.

"Perhaps there will be something waiting at home," he added in his
hoarse barrack-yard voice.

We drove through a white gate into a little drive which brought us up in
front of a