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COUNTESS ELLENBURG PRAYS "Your Majesty still wishes me to send for Baroness Dobrava?"

The King reflected for a moment, and answered simply: "No."

His brief word broke up the conference—it had already lasted longer than suave and reassuring Dr. Natcheff would have advised. The men went away with a smile, all of them—the King, Stenovics, Stafnitz, round-faced Markart—each smiling according to the quality of each, their smiles answering to Max von Hollbrandt's shrug of the shoulders. There are things which bring men to what painful youth was taught to call the least common denominator. A horse-race does it, a prize-fight, a cricket-match, a battle, too, in some sort. Equally efficacious, very often, though it is to be recorded with reluctance, is a strong flirtation with no proper issue obvious.

The matter was grave, yet all the men laughed. The matter was grave, and Countess Ellenburg did not laugh. Was that what Stafnitz called her views and her temperament? In part, no doubt. Besides, men will laugh at the side-issues of the gravest affairs; it is not generally the case with woman. Added again to this, perhaps Countess Ellenburg knew more, or divined more. Among glaring diversity there was, perhaps, something—an atom of—similarity between her and Sophy—not the something which refuses, but the something which couples high conditions with assent. The thousandth chance is to most men negligible; to most women it is no worse than the tenth; their sense of mathematical odds is sorely—and sometimes magnificently—imperfect.

It had flashed across Countess Ellenburg 's mind that maybe Sophy, too, played for a big stake—or, 167