When he said his name, the professor gave a great cry and started from his seat.
'Sabran!' he echoed. 'You edited the "Mexico"!' he exclaimed, and gazed over his spectacles in awe and sympathy commingled at the stranger, who smiled and answered----
'Heard of it!' echoed Greswold. 'Do you take us for barbarians, sir?' It is here, both in my small library, which is the collection of a specialist, and in the great library of the castle, which contains a million of volumes.'
'I am twice honoured,' said the stranger, with a smile of some irony. The good professor was a little disconcerted, and his enthusiasm was damped and cooled. He felt as much embarrassment as though he had been the owner of a discredited work.
'May I not be permitted to congratulate you, sir?' he said timidly. 'To have produced that great work is to possess a title to the gratitude and esteem of all educated men.'
'You are very good,' said Sabran, somewhat indifferently; 'but all that is great in that book is the Marquis Xavier's. I am but the mere compiler.'
'The compilation, the editing of it, required no less learning than the original writer displayed, and that was immense,' said the physician, and with all the enthusiasm of a specialist he plunged into discussion of the many notable points of a mighty intellectual labour, which had received the praise of all the cultured world.
Sabran listened courteously, but with visible weariness. 'You are very good,' he said at last. 'But you will forgive me if I say that I have heard so much of the "Mexico" that I am tempted to wish I had never produced it. I did so as a duty; it was all I could do in honour of one to whom I owed far more than mere life itself.'
'Give me my belt,' said the stranger to the man who waited on him; it was a leathern belt, which had been about his loins; it was made to hold gold and notes, a small six-chambered revolver, and a watch; these were all in it, and with his money was the imperial permission to shoot, which had been given, him by Franz Josef the previous autumn on the Thorstein.
'Your Countess' will doubtless recognise her Emperor's signature,' he said, as he gave the paper to the physician. 'It will serve at least as a passport, if not as a letter of presentation.'