Page:Anthony Hope - The Kings Mirror.djvu/130

 less deeply involved I think his method would have succeeded; even as it was he checked and retarded what he could not stop: The cordiality of our personal relations remained unbroken and so warm that he felt himself able to speak to me in a half-serious, half-jesting way about the Countess von Sempach.

"A most charming woman indeed," said he. "In fact, too charming a woman."

I understood him, and began to defend myself.

"I'm not in love with the Countess," I said; "but I give her my confidence, Prince."

He shook his head, smiled, and took a pinch of snuff, glancing at me humorously.

"Reverse it," he suggested. "Be in love with her, but don't give her your confidence. You'll find it safer and also more pleasant that way."

My confidence might affect high matters, my love he regarded as a passing fever. He did not belong to an age of strict morality in private life, and his bent of mind was utterly opposed to considering an intrigue with a woman of the Countess's attractions as a serious crime in a young man of my position. "Hate her," was my mother's impossible exhortation. "Love her, but don't trust her," was the Prince's subtle counsel. He passed at once from the subject, content with the seed that he had sown. There was much in him and in his teaching which one would defend to-day at some cost of reputation; but I never left him without a heightened and enhanced sense of my position and my obligations. If you will, he lowered the man to exalt the king; this was of a piece with all his wily compromises.

Victoria arrived, and her husband. William Adolphus's attitude was less apologetic than it had been before marriage; he had made Victoria mother