Page:T.M. Royal Highness.djvu/112

96 there was an old-German beer-cellar, which was crowded with the more sedate men. The big dancing-hall and the buffet-room were by now monopolized by the dancers. The buffet-room was filled with fifteen or sixteen young people, sons and daughters of the city, among them Klaus Heinrich. It was a kind of private ball in there. They danced to the music which floated in from the main hall.

Doctor Ueberbein, the Prince's tutor, was seen there for a minute or two, having a short talk with his pupil. He was heard to mention, watch in hand, Herr von Knobelsdorff's name, and to say that he was down in the beer-cellar and was coming back to take the Prince away. Then he went. The time was half-past ten. And while he sat below and conversed with his friends over a tankard of beer, only for an hour or perhaps an hour and a half, not more, those dreadful things, that simply incredible scandal, happened in the buffet-room, to which it fell to him to put a stop, though unfortunately too late.

The punch provided was weak, it contained more soda-water than champagne, and if the young people lost their equilibrium it was more the intoxication of the dance than of the wine. But in view of the Prince's character and the solid bourgeois origin of the rest of the company, that was not enough to explain what happened. Another, a peculiar intoxication, was a factor here on both sides. The peculiar thing was that Klaus Heinrich was fully conscious of each separate stage in this intoxication, and yet had not the power or the will to shake it off.

He was happy. He felt on his cheeks the same glow burning as he saw in the faces of the others, and as his eyes, dazed by a soft mist, travelled about the room, and rested admiringly on one fair form after another, his look seemed to say: "We!" His mouth too said it—said, for the pure joy of saying them, sentences in which a "We" occurred.