lors.'

But when the Baron turned to Seraphina for approval, he found her frozen.
'You are pleased to be witty, Herr von Gondremark,' she said, 'and have
perhaps forgotten where you are. But these rehearsals are apt to be
misleading. Your master, the Prince of Grunewald, is sometimes more
exacting.'

Gondremark cursed her in his soul. Of all injured vanities, that of the
reproved buffoon is the most savage; and when grave issues are involved,
these petty stabs become unbearable. But Gondremark was a man of iron;
he showed nothing; he did not even, like the common trickster, retreat
because he had presumed, but held to his point bravely. 'Madam,' he
said, 'if, as you say, he prove exacting, we must take the bull by the
horns.'

'We shall see,' she said, and she arranged her skirt like one about to
rise. Temper, scorn, disgust, all the more acrid feelings, became her
like jewels; and she now looked her best.

'Pray God they quarrel,' thought Gondremark. 'The damned minx may fail
me yet, unless they quarrel. It is time to let him in. Zz--fight,
dogs!' Consequent on these reflections, he bent a stiff knee and
chivalrously kissed the Princess's hand. 'My Princess,' he said, 'must
now dismiss her servant. I have much to arrange against the hour of
council.'

'Go,' she said, and rose.

And as Gondremark tripped out of a private door, she touched a bell, and
gave the order to admit the Prince.

CHAPTER VI--THE PRINCE DELIVERS A LECTURE ON MARRIAGE, WITH PRACTICAL
ILLUSTRATIONS OF DIVORCE

With what a world of excellent intentions Otto entered his wife's
cabinet! how fatherly, how tender! how morally affecting were the words
he had prepared! Nor was Seraphina unamiably inclined. Her usual fear
of Otto as a marplot in her great designs was now swallowed up in a
passing distrust of the designs themselves. For Gondremark, besides, she
had conceived an angry horror. In her heart she did not like the Baron.
Behind his impudent servility, behind the devotion which, with indelicate
delicacy, he still forced on her attention, she divined the grossness of
his nature. So a man may be proud of having tamed a bear, and yet sicken
at his captive's odour. And above all, she had certain jealous
intimations that the man was false and the deception double. True, she
falsely trifled with his love; but he, perhaps, was only trifling with
her vanity. The insolence of his late mimicry, and the odium of her own
po