Lord Donal, for the first time, laughed heartily.
"Well, if that doesn't beat all! And I suppose Cadbury Taylor hasn't the slightest suspicion that you are the person he was looking for?"
"I say! that is the best joke I have heard in ten years," said Lord Donal; and here, breakfast arriving, Jennie gave him his directions.
"You are to drink a small portion of that brandy," she said, "and then put the rest in your coffee. You must eat a good breakfast, and that will help you to forget your troubles,--that is, if you have any real troubles."
"Oh, my troubles are real enough," said the young man. "When I met you before, Princess, I was reasonably successful. We even talked about ambassadorships, didn't we, in spite of the fact that ambassadors were making themselves unnecessarily obtrusive that night? Now you see before you a ruined man. No, I am not joking; it is true. I was given a commission, or, rather, knowing the danger there was in it, I begged that the commission might be given me. It was merely to take a letter from St. Petersburg to London. I have failed, and when that is said, all is said."
"But surely," cried the girl, blushing guiltily as she realized that this was the man she had been sent to rob, "you could not be expected to ward off such a lawless attempt at murder as you have been the victim of?"
"That is just what I expected, and what I supposed I could ward off. In my profession--which, after all has a great similarity to yours, except that I think we have to do more lying in ours--there must be no such word as fail. The very best excuses are listened to with tolerance, perhaps, and a shrug of the shoulders; but failure, no matter from what cause, is fell doom. I have failed. I shall not make any excuses. I will go to London and say merely, 'The Russian police have robbed me.' Oh, I know perfectly well who did the trick, and how it was done. Then I shall send in my resignation. They will accept it with polite words of regret, and will say to each other, 'Poor fellow, he had a brilliant career before him, but he got drunk, or something, and fell into the ditch.' Ah, well, we won't talk any more about it."
"Then you don't despise the newspaper profession, Lord Donal?"