“I may change for the worse,” he threatened.  “I think I have, already.  I don’t believe I could stand up to Dryfoos, now, as I did for poor old Lindau, when I risked your bread and butter for his.  I look back in wonder and admiration at myself.  I’ve steadily lost touch with life since then.  I’m a trifler, a dilettante, and an amateur of the right and the good as I used to be when I was young.  Oh, I have the grace to be troubled at times, now, and once I never was.  It never occurred to me then that the world wasn’t made to interest me, or at the best to instruct me, but it does, now, at times.”

She always came to his defence when he accused himself; it was the best ground he could take with her.  “I think you behaved very well with Burnamy.  You did your duty then.”

“Did I?  I’m not so sure.  At any rate, it’s the last time I shall do it.  I’ve served my term.  I think I should tell him that he was all right in that business with Stoller, if I were to meet him, now.”

“Isn’t it strange,” she said, provisionally, “that we don’t come upon a trace of him anywhere in Ansbach?”

“Ah, you’ve been hoping he would turn up!”

“Yes.  I don’t deny it.  I feel very unhappy about him.”

“I don’t.  He’s too much like me.  He would have been quite capable of promising that poor woman to look up her son in Jersey City.  When I think of that, I have no patience with Burnamy.”

“I am going to ask the landlord about him, now he’s got rid of his highhotes,” said Mrs. March.

XLIX.

They went home to their hotel for their midday dinner, and to the comfort of having it nearly all to themselves.  Prince Leopold had risen early, like all the hard-working potentates of the continent, and got away to the manoeuvres somewhere at six o’clock; the decorations had been removed, and the court-yard where the hired coach and pair of the prince had rolled in the evening before had only a few majestic ducks waddling about in it and quacking together, indifferent to the presence of a yellow mail-wagon, on which the driver had been apparently dozing till the hour of noon should sound.  He sat there immovable, but at the last stroke of the clock he woke up and drove vigorously away to the station.

The dining-room which they had been kept out of by the prince the night before was not such as to embitter the sense of their wrong by its splendor.  After all, the tastes of royalty must be simple, if the prince might have gone to the Schloss and had chosen rather to stay at this modest hotel; but perhaps the Schloss was reserved for more immediate royalty than the brothers of prince-regents; and in that case he could not have done better than dine at the Golden Star.  If he paid no more than two marks, he dined as cheaply as a prince could wish, and as abundantly.  The wine at Ansbach was rather thin and sour, but the bread, March declared, was the best bread in the whole world, not excepting the bread of Carlsbad.