He raised his glass.  “Delightful young English lady,” he said, “I drink to your charming eyes.”

There’s dinner.  I must leave off.

  Eleven p. m.

You’ll never believe it, but Kloster has been given the Order of the Red Eagle 1st Class, and made a privy councillor and an excellency by the Kaiser this very day.  And his most intimate friends, the cleverest talkers among his set, two or three who used to hold forth particularly brilliantly in his rooms on Socialism and the slavish stupidity of Germans, have each had an order and an advancement of some sort.  Kloster was at the palace this afternoon.  He knew about it yesterday when I was having my lesson. Kloster.  Of all men.  I feel sick.

Bernd didn’t come to dinner, but was able to be with me for half an hour afterwards, half an hour of comfort I badly needed, for where can one’s feet be set firmly and safely in this upheaving world?  The Colonel was at dinner; he comes to nearly every meal; and it was he who started talking about Kloster’s audience with Majestat this afternoon.

I jumped as though some one had hit me.  “That can’t be true,” I exclaimed, exactly as one calls out quickly if one is suddenly struck.

They all looked at me.  Somehow I saw that they had known about it beforehand, and Bernd told me tonight it was the Graf who had drawn the authorities’ attention to the desirability of having tongues like Kloster’s on the side of the Hohenzollerns.

“Dear child,” said the Grafin gently, “we Germans do not permit our great to go unhonoured.”

“But he would never—­” I began; then remembered my lesson yesterday and his silence.  So that’s what it was.  He already had his command to attend at the palace and be decorated in his pocket.

I sat staring straight before me.  Kloster bought?  Kloster for sale?  And the Government at such a crisis finding time to bother about him?

“Ja, ja,” said the Colonel gaily, as though answering my thoughts—­and I found I had been staring, without seeing him, straight into his eyes, “ja, ja, we think of everything here.”

“Not,” gently amended the Grafin, “that it was difficult to think of honouring so great a genius as our dear Kloster.  He has been in Majestat’s thoughts for years.”

“I expect he has,” I said; for Kloster has often told me how they hated him at court, him and his friends, but that he was too well known all over the world for them to be able to interfere with him; something like, I expect, Tolstoi and the Russian court.

The Grafin looked at me quickly.

“And so has Majestat been in his,” I continued.

“Kloster,” said the Grafin very gently, “is a most amusing talker, and sometimes cannot resist saying the witty things that occur to him, however undesirable they may be.  We all know they mean nothing.  We all understand and love our Kloster.  And nobody, as you see, dear child, more than Majestat, with his ever ready appreciation of genius.”