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“Well, all right. Mrs. Kenton is waiting for us to go to dinner. And look here,” whispered the colonel, “don’t you open your mouth, except to put something into it, till I give you the cue.”

The dinner was charming, and had suffered little or nothing from the delay. Mrs. Kenton was in raptures with it, and after a thimbleful of the good Hungarian wine had attuned her tongue, she began to sing the praises of the Kaiserin Elisabeth.

“The K—-” began the consul, who had hitherto guarded himself very well. But the colonel arrested him at that letter with a terrible look. He returned the look with a glance of intelligence, and resumed: “The Kaiserin Elisabeth has the best cook in Vienna.”

“And everybody about has such nice, honest faces,” said Mrs. Kenton. “I’m sure I couldn’t have felt anxious if you hadn’t come till midnight: I knew I was perfectly secure here.”

“Quite right, quite right,” said the consul. “All classes of the Viennese are so faithful. Now, I dare say you could have trusted that driver of yours, who brought you here before daylight this morning, with untold gold. No stranger need fear any of the tricks ordinarily practised upon travellers in Vienna. They are a truthful, honest, virtuous population,–like all the Germans in fact.”

“There, Ned! What do you say to that, with your Black Forest nonsense?” triumphed Mrs. Kenton.

Colonel Kenton laughed sheepishly: “Well, I take it all back, Bessie. I wasn’t quite satisfied with the appearance of the Black Forest country when I came to it,” he explained to the consul, “and Mrs. Kenton and I had our little joke about the fraudulent nature of the Germans.”

“Our little joke!” retorted his wife. “I wish we were going to stay longer in Vienna. They say you have to make bargains for everything in Italy, and here I suppose I could shop just as at home.”

“Precisely,” said the consul; the Viennese shopkeepers being the most notorious Jews in Europe.

“Oh, we can’t stop longer than till the morning,” remarked the colonel. “I shall be sorry to leave Vienna and the Kaiserin Elizabeth, but we must go.”

“Better hang on awhile; you won’t find many hotels like it, Kenton,” observed his friend.

“No, I suppose not,” sighed the colonel; “but I’ll get the address of their correspondent in Venice and stop there.”

Thus these craven spirits combined to delude and deceive the helpless woman of whom half an hour before they had stood in such abject terror. If they had found her in hysterics they would have pitied and respected her; but her good sense, her amiability, and noble self-control subjected her to their shameless mockery.

Colonel Kenton followed the consul downstairs when he went away, and pretended to justify himself. “I’ll tell her one of these days,” he said, “but there’s no use distressing her now.”

“I didn’t understand you at first,” said the other. “But I see now it was the only way.”

“Yes; saves needless suffering. I say, Davis, this is about an even thing between us? A United States consul ought to be of some use to his fellow-citizens abroad; and if he allows them to walk their legs off hunting up a hotel which he could have found at the first police-station if he had happened to think of it, he won’t be very anxious to tell the joke, I suppose?”

“I don’t propose to write home to the papers about it.”

“All right.” So, in the court-yard of the Wild Man, they parted.

Long after that Mrs. Kenton continued to recommend people to the Kaiserin Elisabeth. Even when the truth was made known to her she did not see much to laugh at. “I’m sure I was always very glad the colonel didn’t tell me at once,” she said, “for if I had known what I had been through, I certainly should have gone distracted.”