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“Look here, Kenton,” he said, “you’ve made a little mistake, this time. You’re not stopping at the Kaiserin Elisabeth!”

“Oh, pshaw! Come now! Don’t bring the consular dignity so low as to enter into a practical joke with a hotel porter. It won’t do. We got into Vienna this morning at three, and drove straight to the Kaiserin Elisabeth. We had a room and fire, and breakfast about noon. Tell him who I am, and what I say.”

The consul did so, the portier slowly and respectfully shaking his head at every point. When it came to the name, he turned to his books, and shook his head yet more impressively. Then he took down a letter, spelled its address, and handed it to the colonel; it was his own note to Mrs. Kenton. That quite crushed him. He looked at it in a dull, mechanical way, and nodded his head with compressed lips. Then he scanned the portier, and glanced round once more at the bedevilled architecture. “Well,” said he, at last, “there’s a mistake somewhere. Unless there are two Kaiserin Elisabeths–. Davis, ask him if there are two Kaiserin Elisabeths.”

The consul compassionately put the question, received with something like grief by the portier. Impossible!

“Then I’m not stopping at either of them,” continued the colonel. “So far, so good,–if you want to call it good. The question is now, if I’m not stopping at the Kaiserin Elisabeth,” he demanded, with sudden heat, and raising his voice, “how the devil did I get there?”

The consul at this broke into a fit of laughter so violent that the portier retired a pace or two from these maniacs, and took up a safe position within his doorway. “You didn’t–you didn’t–get there!” shrieked the consul. “That’s what made the whole trouble. You–you meant well, but you got somewhere else.” He took out his handkerchief and wiped the tears from his eyes.

The colonel did not laugh; he had no real pleasure in the joke. On the contrary, he treated it as a serious business. “Very well,” said he, “it will be proved next that I never told that driver to take me to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, as it appears that I never got there and am not stopping there. Will you be good enough to tell me,” he asked, with polished sarcasm, “where I am stopping, and why, and how?’

“I wish with all my heart I could,” gasped his friend, catching his breath, “but I can’t, and the only way is to go round to the principal hotels till we hit the right one. It won’t take long. Come!” He passed his arm through that of the colonel, and made an explanation to the portier, as if accounting for the vagaries of some harmless eccentric he had in charge. Then he pulled his friend gently away, who yielded after a survey of the portier and the court-yard with a frown in which an indignant sense of injury quite eclipsed his former bewilderment. He had still this defiant air when they came to the next hotel, and used the portier with so much severity on finding that he was not stopping there, either, that the consul was obliged to protest: “If you behave in that way, Kenton, I won’t go with you. The man’s perfectly innocent of your stopping at the wrong place; and some of these hotel people know me, and I won’t stand your bullying them. And I tell you what: you’ve got to let me have my laugh out, too. You know the thing’s perfectly ridiculous, and there’s no use putting any other face on it.” The consul did not wait for leave to have his laugh out, but had it out in a series of furious gusts. At last the colonel himself joined him ruefully.

“Of course,” said he, “I know I’m an ass, and I wouldn’t mind it on my own account. I would as soon roam round after that hotel the rest of the night as not, but I can’t help feeling anxious about my wife. I’m afraid she’ll be getting very uneasy at my being gone so long. She’s all alone, there, wherever it is, and–“