And he finished with a frank and hearty laugh—­not that there was anything to laugh at, but merely because he was young, and looked at life from a cheerful standpoint.

Cartoner sipped his coffee, and looked reflectively at his companion over the cup.  “Cartoner,” Paul Deulin had once said to a common friend, “weighs you, and naturally finds you wanting.”  It seemed that he was weighing Prince Martin Bukaty now.

“I saw your father also,” he said, at length.  “He was kind enough to ask me to call, which I did.”

“That was kind of you.  Of course we know no one in London—­no one, I mean, who speaks anything except English.  That is a thing which is never quite understood on the Continent—­that if you go to London you must speak English.  If you cannot, you had better hang yourself and be done with it, for you are practically in solitary confinement.  My father does not easily make friends—­you must have been very civil to him.”

“According to my lights, I was,” admitted Cartoner.

Martin laughed again.  It is a gay heart that can be amused at three in the morning.

“The truth is,” continued Martin, in his quick and rather heedless way, “that we Poles are under a cloud in Europe now.  We are the wounded man by the side of the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho, and there is a tendency to pass by on the other side.  We are a nation with a bad want, and it is nobody’s business to satisfy it.  Everybody is ready, however, to admit that we have been confoundedly badly treated.”

He tossed off his coffee as he spoke, and turned in his chair to nod an acknowledgment to the profound bows of a gold-laced official who had approached him, and who now tendered an envelope, with some murmured words of politeness.

“Thank you—­thank you,” said Prince Martin, and slipped the envelope within his pocket.

“It is my passport,” he explained to Cartoner, lightly.  “All the rest of you will receive yours when you are in the train.  Mine is the doubtful privilege of being known here, and being a suspected character.  So they are doubly polite and doubly watchful.  As for you, at Alexandrowo you rejoice in a happy obscurity.  You will pass in with the crowd, I suppose.”

“I always try to,” replied Cartoner.  Which was strictly true.

“You see,” went on Martin, not too discreetly, considering their environments, “we cannot forget that we were a great nation before there was a Russian Empire or an Austrian Empire or a German Empire.  We are a landlady who has seen better days; who has let her lodgings to three foreign gentlemen who do not pay the rent—­who make us clean their boots and then cast them at our heads.”

The doors of the great room had now been thrown open, and the passengers were passing slowly out to the long, deserted platform.  It was almost daylight now, and the train was drawn up in readiness to start, with a fresh engine and new officials.  The homeliness of Germany had vanished, giving place to that subtle sense of discomfort and melancholy which hangs in the air from the Baltic to the Pacific coast.