Ranata had too much tact to rise impulsively, for she towered above the minister by not a few inches, but she held out her hand and shook his warmly, and her face was radiant. “I am so glad! I am so glad!” she cried softly. “And you do not hate me! I have been so desperately bored and hopeless that it has given me a certain pleasure to make enemies--if only for the sake of sensation; and as you were the most powerful man in the Empire, it amused me to defy you. In your magnanimity you have forgiven me! If you knew how grateful I am, how I thank you!” His Excellency trembled, but he kept his head; how, he never knew. “Your Imperial Highness,” he said, “I, too, am a patriot. I am acting in this instance, as in all others, in the service of the Empire. If, in addition, I am to be permitted to act in the service of a woman--of such a woman--madam, will you permit me to retire?” VIII “We parted with mutual distrust, a mutual increase of respect, even of tolerance, and a common determination to make use of each other,” said the Archduchess to Alexandra, as she finished the account of her interview with the minister. They were alone in her salon. “I reserved my Americanism for a future occasion, and played the old European game of the cat and the mouse. He is not in the least sure which is the cat and which the mouse. Neither am I, for that matter; but I have the advantage of knowing him better than he knows me. However, here I am for the present.” Alexandra drew a long and almost voluptuous sigh of content. “No more awful evenings in the Hofburg!--whist with his Majesty, or, worse still, with M. L.; a little music; tittle-tattle about the same threadbare old royalties, the last novel--French and wicked--the play, the last baby--there are always several; yawns, decorum _ad nauseam_; mad desire to lie down on the floor and kick up your heels. Oh, just and beneficent Heaven that sent William to Hungary with a wasp at his heel!” “Let us forget William--and Austria. Where are the cigarettes?” The girls smoked in silence for a time, the Archduchess staring hard before her, after her habit, as if she were poring over the cryptogram of the future. When the short Russian cigarette had burned to its mouth-piece she returned to the present. “I suppose it will be wise to pay my new friend the compliment of asking his advice about my Hungarian household--about the Obersthofmeisterin, at all events. I will write him an autograph letter to-night. What tact I shall develop with a few weeks’ practice! I wonder who the new duenna will be? But no one even he approved of could be worse than Maria Leopoldina, and, after twelve years in the arena with her, I flatter myself I am more than a match for the most masterful he could select.”