sister. "Could you not have restrained yourself, Regine? Why make a
scene? This Hartmut exists no more for us."

Regine's face showed clearly her intense excitement, and her lips
trembled as she answered:

"I am no such staid diplomat as you, Herbert. I have not yet learned to
be calm and indifferent when one whom I have for years imagined dead, or
gone to ruin, suddenly springs up before me."

"Dead? He was too young to make that a probability. Gone to ruin? That
is indeed possible, judging from his life lately."

"What do you mean?" asked his sister excitedly. "What do you know of
his life?"

"I know something of it. Falkenried is too dear to me to make me lose
sight altogether of his son. I have never mentioned what I knew to
either of you. But as soon as I returned to my post, ten years ago, I
used my diplomatic position to ascertain what I could concerning them."

"And what did you learn?"

"At first, only what we already knew, that Zalika had taken her son to
Roumania. You knew that her step-father, our cousin Wallmoden, had died
some time before, and after her divorce from Falkenried she always lived
with her mother. From that time we heard nothing of her until she came
to Germany to capture her son, but just before she came, as I learned,
she inherited a large fortune by the death of her brother."