A couple of words, no more, may be devoted to an interlude, which had for scene a big city in a neighbouring kingdom, and was brought about by Captain von Braunbart with all due circumspection. The Captain had a friend in this city, a bachelor nobleman and a cavalry captain, who was on terms of intimacy with a young lady member of the theatrical world, an accommodating and at the same time trustworthy young person. In pursuance of an agreement by letter between Captain von Braunbart and his friend, Klaus Heinrich was thrown in contact with the damsel at her home--suitably arranged for the purpose--and the acquaintance allowed to develop _à deux_. Thus an expressly foreseen item in the educational tour was conscientiously realized, without Klaus Heinrich being involved in more than a casual acquaintance. The damsel received a memento for her services, and Captain von Braunbart's friend a decoration. So the incident closed. Klaus Heinrich also visited the fair Southern lands, incognito, under a romantic-sounding title. There he would sit, alone, perhaps for a quarter of an hour, dressed in a suit of irreproachable cut, among other foreigners on a white restaurant terrace looking over a dark-blue sea, and it might happen that somebody at another table would notice him, and try, in the manner of tourists, to engage him in conversation. What could he be, that quiet and self-possessed-looking young man? People ran over the various spheres of life, tried to fit him into the merchant, the military, the student class. But they never felt that they had got it quite right--they felt his Highness, but nobody guessed it. V ALBRECHT II Grand Duke Johann Albrecht died of a terrible illness, which had something naked and abstract about it, and to which no other name but just that of death could be given. It seemed as if death, sure of its prey, in this case disdained any mask or gloss, and came on the scene as its very self, as dissolution by and for itself. What actually happened was a decomposition of the blood, caused by internal hæmorrhages; and an exploratory operation, which was conducted by the Director of the University Hospital, a famous surgeon, could not arrest the corroding progress of the gangrene. The end soon came, all the sooner that Johann Albrecht made little resistance to the approach of death. He showed signs of an unutterable weariness, and often remarked to his attendants, as well as to the surgeons attending him, that he was "dead sick of the whole thing"--meaning, of course, his princely existence, his exalted life in the glare of publicity. His cheek-furrows, those two lines of arrogance and boredom, resolved in his last days into an exaggerated, grotesque grimace, and continued thus until death smoothed them out.