rock, but makes itself a mirror to the same. She'll keep her money and
nurse her babe, and not be trying risky adventures to turn him into a
reigning prince. Only this: you'll have to persuade her the thing is
impossible. She'll not take it from any of us. She looks on you as
Wisdom in the uniform of a great commander, and if you say a thing can be
done it 's done.'

'The reverse too, I hope,' said Mr. Mattock, nodding and passing on his
way.

'That I am not so sure of,' Con remarked to himself. 'There's a change
in a man through a change in his position! Six months or so back, Phil,
that man came from Vienna, the devoted slave of the Princess Nikolas.
He'd been there on his father's business about one of the Danube
railways, and he was ready to fill the place of the prince at the head
of his phantom body of horse and foot and elsewhere. We talked of his
selling her estates for the purchase of arms and the enemy--as many as
she had money for. We discussed it as a matter of business. She had
bewitched him: and would again, I don't doubt, if she were here to repeat
the dose. But in the interim his father dies, he inherits; and he enters
Parliament, and now, mind you, the man who solemnly calculated her
chances and speculates on the transmission of rifled arms of the best
manufacture and latest invention by his yacht and with his loads of
rails, under the noses of the authorities, like a master rebel, and a
chivalrous gentleman to boot, pooh poohs the whole affair. You saw him.
Grave as an owl, the dead contrary of his former self!'

'I thought I heard you approve him,' said Philip.

'And I do. But the poor girl has ordered her estates to be sold to cast