The Count immediately rose and opened a small door leading to a boudoir. The Prince rose and bowed. The Princess swept to the ground before him in an elaborate curtsey, and, looking contemptuously, yet with a certain amused interest, at Mark, left the room. The Prince resumed his seat, and, leaning back, looked from one to the other of his companions. He was really thinking with amusement what a so strangely-assorted couple might be likely to say to each other; but the Count, misled by his desire to please the Prince, misunderstood him. He supposed that he wished that the conversation which the Princess had interrupted should be continued, and, sitting down, he began again. "I suppose, Herr Tutor," he said, "you propose to train your pupils so that they shall be best fitted to mingle with the world in which they will be called upon to play an important part?" The Prince motioned to Mark to sit, which he did, upon the edge of an embroidered couch. "If the serene Highness," he said, "had wished for one to teach his children who knew the great world and the cities he would not have sent for me." "What do you teach them, then?" "I tell them beautiful histories," said Mark, "of good people, and of love, and of God." "It has been proved," said the Count, "that there is no God." "Then there is still love," said the boy. "Yes, there is still love," said the Count, with an amused glance at the Prince; "all the more that we have got rid of a cruel God." The boy's face flushed. "How can you dare say that?" he said. "Why," said the Count, with a simulated warmth, "what is the God of you pious people but a cruel God? He who condemns the weak and the ignorant--the weak whom He has Himself made weak, and the ignorant whom He keeps in darkness--to an eternity of torture for a trivial and temporary, if not an unconscious, fault? What is that God but cruel who will not forgive till He has gratified His revenge upon His own Son? What is that God but cruel---- But I need not go on. The whole thing is nothing but a figment and a dream, hatched in the diseased fancies of half-starved monks dying by inches in caves and deserts, terrified by the ghastly visions of a ruined body and a disordered mind--men so stupid and so wicked that they could not discern the nature of the man whom they professed to take for their God--a man, apparently, one of those rare natures, in advance of their time, whom friends and enemies alike misconceive and thwart; and who die, as He died, helpless and defeated, with a despairing cry to a heedless or visionary God in whom they have believed in vain."