At all events, in this particular case, he put his foot down. One must draw the line somewhere—that was generally admitted; and he proposed to draw it at the daughters of high-school teachers. They might come of healthier stock than Archdukes and Archduchesses; their blood might be freer from the taint of insanity; and they might be less likely to leap their horses over poor people’s coffins when they were sober and undress to dance in cafés when they were drunk. Nevertheless they were unfit—grossly and impossibly unfit—to be married by Archdukes; and if the Archduke Francis Charles did not take that view of the matter, then he should be an Archduke no longer, but should depart—an imperial castaway—and hide his shame in a foreign land. But the Archduke Ferdinand Charles had not Francis Joseph’s reverence for caste, and was not to be browbeaten. His rights as a man and a lover were more to him than his rights as an Archduke and a possible heir to the throne; and his instinct told him that he was choosing the better part. Fräulein Czuber had never hoped to be an Archduchess; and he would be delighted to relieve her of awkward embarrassment by ceasing to be an Archduke. If he needed a new name, he had a little property at Burg which would supply one. Fräulein Czuber would love him as Charles Burg just as much as she had loved him as Archduke Ferdinand Charles—better, perhaps, seeing that he would have made a sacrifice for her sake. As Herr and Frau Burg, therefore, he and she would face the world together. So he spoke; and the thing which he said that he would do he did—renouncing, and then disappearing. He passes out of our narrative as an ordinary passenger, driving in an ordinary cab to catch an ordinary train, bound for the Riviera—starting without even a crowd to note whether rice fell when he shook himself or luck-bearing slippers pursued him. May all good things attend him in the middle-class retreat which he has found! His demonstration against the Habsburg system has been a fine one, and has been made in time: a safe escape from decadence before the doom was yet in sight; a sane escape, and not one of those—too frequent among the Habsburgs—of which the true nature and underlying motive have been obscured by bizarre eccentricities and crying scandals. Whether Francis Joseph classes the case among those in which Nemesis has smitten him through the members of his family is more than one can presume to say. We will pass from it to some of those cases in which Francis Joseph has given his consent—sometimes with his blessing, and sometimes without it.