Three weeks passed, and Stambuloff began to demand his prince most urgently. The argument about waiting for the consent of the Powers was ignored by the Statesman. Ferdinand was warned in unmistakable terms that the offer was only open for a few more days. He must come now, or never. Then, forgetting all his protestations that he would only accept if the Powers endorsed the choice of Bulgaria, Ferdinand went. He went with a cant phrase in his mouth; he has spouted miles of such stuff in the quarter-century and more that has since elapsed. But this first piece of cant that fell from the lips of the new prince caused the Courts of Europe to smile and the Chancelleries to chuckle. “I regard it as my sacred duty to set foot at the earliest possible moment on the soil of my new country.” Thus the Pot-house Prince, who bargained for a principality in a beer garden, and who was introduced to the first of his new subjects in a billiard-room through the mediation of a Jewish moneylender and a needy Austrian man-about-town. But Ferdinand did not care; he had got the job which had been dangled before his eyes since first he could remember. He had fulfilled his mother’s dearest wish, and got his foot in among the Rulers of Europe. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE TRAINING OF A TRAITOR “_He lived in an atmosphere of womanly luxury, so that sweet perfumes and pretty flowers became necessaries of life to him._” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER II THE TRAINING OF A TRAITOR Ferdinand owed his principality to his mother, Princess Clementine of Orleans, the youngest and cleverest daughter of the French King Louis Philippe. He owed also his capacity for filling the position to the training bestowed upon him by that truly remarkable woman. It was a peculiar training, for he was trained to fill a hypothetical throne. Make a king of him, was his mother’s motto, and the kingdom is sure to turn up some day. Clementine of Orleans was one of the stormy petrels of European inner politics. “The Czar’s nightmare, the Austrian Emperor’s bogey, and Bismarck’s sleeping draught” had been the epigrammatic description of the rôle she played, thrown off after deep consideration by an English diplomatist who worked out his impromptus very thoroughly. She had married Prince Augustus of Saxe-Coburg Kohary, and by the Kohary hangs a tale. It was supposed by the vulgar to be an additional title, but it really was an excrescence on the Saxe-Coburg appellation, tacked on in return for some millions in hard cash. The original Kohary was a swindling army contractor whose name in England would be Cohen. He had made untold wealth by a system of army contracting which has its feeble imitators at the present day, and he cherished high ambitions for his pretty daughter Tony.