"One time it had been cut or mangled."
"The man was tall?"
"Yes, Highness."
The duke silently toyed with the little yellow shoes. Suddenly he
laughed; but it was the terrible laughter of a madman. There were death
and desolation in it.
"Come, all of you; you, Gretchen, and you, Hildegarde; come, Carmichael,
and you, Arnsberg; all of you! Let us go and pay a visit to our good
friend, Herbeck!"
CHAPTER XXII
A LITTLE FINGER
The king of Jugendheit, Prince Ludwig, and the chancellor sat in the
form of a triangle. Herbeck was making a pyramid of his finger-tips,
sometimes touching his chin with his thumbs. His face was cheerful. His
royal highness, still in the guise of a mountaineer, sat stiffly in his
chair, the expression on his face hardly translatable; that on the
king's not at all. He was dressed in the brilliant uniform of a colonel
in the Prussian Uhlans, an honor conferred upon him recently by King
William. Prior to his advent into the Grand Duchy of Ehrenstein he had
been to Berlin. A whim, for which he was now grateful, had cozened him
into carrying this uniform along with him on his adventures. It was only
after he met Gretchen that there came moments when he forgot he was a
king. He was pale. From hour to hour his heart seemed to grow colder and
smaller and harder, till it now rested in his breast with the heaviness
of a stone, out of which life and the care of living had been squeezed.
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