The next morning I came upon our Hanska in Speisendorf street, hands in pockets, whistling (as ever) at the crucifix on the mountain. This knit little chit of a man had a pride in his cylinders and some flea of flight in his brain; he and his car were well ready for me, and we reached Gratz in the early afternoon after a charming ride.

I had no hope that affairs would go flyingly with me in Gratz, and thought to myself, "this will be a matter of some days"; but it was three weeks before I left the town.

Whether those were trying weeks for me will be divined: I was afraid for Dees, afraid for Langler up there alone in the mountains, and afraid to open the letters from Swandale which he forwarded on to me. Miss Emily had, in truth, become awfully eager and anxious! all too eager and anxious, I thought. Why the delay, she wished to know! I had begged Langler to write her fully of everything as it happened, but no, he chose to be general and vague, and this only enlarged, instead of lulling, her fears. She was now back in Swandale, living partly with the Misses Chambers, and was quite well, she said. But something in me boded that she was not so well as she said.

Hence those weeks in Gratz were rather to me like three years. Among Langler's letters of introduction was one to a Herr MÜller, a grain-merchant in the Holz Platz, upon whom I first called; he received me heartily, and introduced me to a certain Herr von Dungern, a lawyer, who said to me in his office on the morning after my arrival: "I'm afraid that that letter of yours written from England to Public Safety—foh! foh!—unsupported by evidence as it was, will now be against you." He was a fine, soldierly man, but afflicted with something which caused him to mix in all his talk this foh! foh! flung sideways with venom. "But," said I, "that old letter of ours must be forgotten by now." "Oh no," he answered; "there it still lies in the Evidenz-bureau, and you know that interest in a question once dead is not easily revived." "That may be," said I, "but I can now take oath that I have seen the Pater Dees in his dungeon, and here is Mr Langler's written statement, which you will duly formalise for me." "True, true," said he, "very true. Well, it is a matter—foh! foh!—for the Blessed Virgin and Herr Oberpolizeirath."

I now know that this Herr von Dungern was a tenant of land under Baron KolÁr, but still, I can't accuse him of untrustiness to me, only of slowness—of intentional slowness, I think. It was not till the following morning that I was brought to the bureaux with the affidavits, and then it was from bureau to bureau, each interview somehow filling up the better part of a day, and everyone as it were laying his hand over his mouth at the high scandal which I was so bold as to air. "But," said I to Herr von Dungern as we drove away on the fourth evening, "someone must be the final authority! I have now been referred up and up from a common Sicherheits-wache-serjeant to two Polizeiraths, and still no end to it." "Lands, manners," said he, with a shrug—"every country has its usages." "Just so," said I, "but I am still at a loss to know why I have spent my afternoon with Herr Polizeirath of Central Inquiry in a case where there is nothing to inquire into." "Well," said he, hardly very honestly, "one, of course, must see Herr Polizeirath before one can see Herr Oberpolizeirath." "Yes," said I, "Herr Polizeirath of Safety, but why, after all, Herr Polizeirath of Inquiry? the interview seems to have been as needless as it was long!" "You do not—foh! foh!—understand," said he. "No," said I, "I do not, and it is very trying." "I am grieved from the heart," said he, "for I foresee that your patience is about to be tried; but you must amuse yourself, since everyone in our city is eager to entertain you, and the good Lord, thank God, does not grudge us any innocent gaieties; my wife and daughters in especial look forward with keenness to seeing you at our birthday-ball." "But that is a week hence!" said I: "do you anticipate that I shall still be in Gratz?" "Ah, it may be!" said he, "we shall see: to-morrow at eleven we appear before Herr Oberpolizeirath of Safety himself...."

This Herr Oberpolizeirath, whose name was Tiarks, was a gross old man, all slashed and epauletted, with a nose like a bunch of blackberries in August. I was received by him in a chamber which brought back to my mind the scented answer which he had sent to our letter from Swandale, and from the first I had little hope in this old man. "But what, sir," he asked me, "is your motive in this affair?" "A motive of humanity," I answered: "a bird sent out by the captive with a note bound about its leg came to the house of my friend; we felt bound to investigate the matter; we have done so; and we now place it with confidence in your hands." "But," said he, "in order to see this captive, you must have entered upon Schweinstein Castle by stealth?" "Yes," I answered cuttingly, "but that, I take it, is not a point which will distract your Honour's attention from the proved fact of an outrage committed within the scope of your jurisdiction." "But," said he, his face flushing purpler, "perhaps you will find, sir, that the Austrian authorities are not inclined to allow themselves to be pleased with chords (pretensions) strung too high." "I have already found it, Herr Oberpolizeirath," said I. "Ach, it is an affair, this!" sighed he faintly to himself, with a waved hand, and eyes cast upward.

In the greater part of the interview I had no share, but sat staring at the apple-green walls, while Tiarks and von Dungern laid their heads together apart. Such shrugs, such spreadings of both palms, and gazings over the rims of spectacles, one never saw! Then came the proposal that I should drop my plaint for a time, till the baron should be given a chance to set free his captive; to which I answered angrily: "But is Baron KolÁr to be forewarned by those who should be his judges? He will never of himself set free this captive, and if he be given hints and nudges in the dark I shall consider that both justice and myself have been betrayed." "Eh, eh, we know that the English hold no leaf before the mouth!" cried Herr Oberpolizeirath, with a waved hand: "but do you imagine, sir, that the baron does not already know what is being done? Poh, he knows; all Gratz knows. And would you not prefer to withdraw the plaint a little, rather than see it referred to the President at Vienna, and then perhaps up to the Provincial Diet itself after several months? Come, take your lawyer's advice; and meantime, if you stay on in Gratz—why, we know that every young man craves for the society of the opposite sex—saving the claims of religion, mind you, saving the claims of religion; but between us three here, you can't beat Gratz for female loveliness: what, von Dungern? Yes, sir, drop the plaint a little, and on the 7th of the month you have the Statthalterei Ball, on the 8th Count Attem's, on the 9th the Prince-bishop of Seckau comes into residence, with street-processions, church-rites"—and more of this sort. In this way this old fogey thought to stroke my beard with honey, as the Germans say. Of course, I did not drop the plaint, and it was formally heard the next day before a lower commissary: but I might as well have dropped it! From the tenth day I began to despair, for I had by then been put through even the formality of giving the date of my mother's birth, had interviewed at the rathhaus, land-hause, Schlossberg people whose relation with the affair seemed to be as remote and entangled as possible; and I said then to myself: "Max Dees was right: they don't mean to interfere."

Meantime I wrote daily to, and heard from, Langler, and enclosed in his letters came some from Swandale which made the delays of the authorities maddening to me, because of a panting for our return which those letters now appeared to reveal. Alas, at the bottom of her heart Miss Emily did not believe that we should ever return to her, I think; but mixed with this under-despair was that hope which is common to all the living, and I believe that it was this hope battling for breath against this despair which gave rise to this sort of fierce haste that now possessed and hissed in her to see our faces yet once again.

Gratz, meantime, was as lively a town, both in a social and religious way, as it is ever a charming one. I saw the fÊte of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin, and that of the Precious Blood on the Sunday following, and each time I peeped into St Ægidius it was full of people praying, with a priest or two pacing among them, like well-satisfied shepherds, while in the lesser churches also was much the same sight. I had nothing to do at night, and to escape from myself went to two balls, at the first of which a little German monk, who reminded me of Luther, gave a homily on the lawfulness of innocent amusements. But I was sick of Gratz by the eleventh day, and was wrought to throw up everything, when something gave me a new thought.

On that eleventh day I was strolling in an alley of the Stadt Park when I saw coming towards me a girl whom I had long known—a particularly pretty little girl named Rosie, who for some years had been in the service of my sister, Lady Burney, but now was in the service of the Duchess of St Albans. When I expressed my surprise at seeing her, her answer was: "the duchess is on the way to Vienna, but stopped at Gratz to have an interview with Baron KolÁr; she understood in London that the baron is at Schweinstein, but he isn't, as it turns out, and no one seems to know where he is somehow, so I don't know what our next move will be."

We sat under a tree within sound of the band, and had a long talk that afternoon, for this servant-girl seemed to know everybody of any importance in Europe and the secret history of all that was going on, so she not only kept me amused, but posted me anew as to things and men in an astonishing way. Her mistress was, of course, the great lady in English politics, and had a habit, Rosie said, of making her her messenger, and even of "consulting her opinion"! Speaking of Ambrose Rivers, she said that he had now won a following of over eight hundred, and had opened a church in Kensington, to which she had once gone: "it is a kind of a cross between a theatre and a gymnasium," said she, "but the duchess regards him more as a crank than as a serious force in religious politics, and he only owes it to Dr Burton's illness that he has not been already brought under the consistory court. Ah!" she added in her bright way, "I saw that fit of Dr Burton's!" "What, you were present?" said I. "I alone," said she: "I was even the cause of it." "How do you mean—the cause of it?" I asked. "I'll tell you," said she, "but, of course, it is between us, sir. Never was so frightened in my life! It was about nine in the evening, at the palace, the duchess had sent me with a note, I was to wait for an answer, and was led into a room in that Blore part. The Archbishop, who was at a table covered with papers, laid the note by his side, said 'take a chair' to me, and went on writing. I noticed that he was not looking well: every two minutes he heaved a sigh, twice got up to look for something, but seemed to forget what, and sat down again without, and he would press his hand to his brow, as if he had a headache. Presently he sprang up, and began to pace about: all this time, mind you, he hadn't opened the duchess's note, nor seemed to be aware that I was anywhere, and I, of course, sat quite mum, taking stock of my archbishop. But, all at once, he saw me, looked at me—didn't say anything, went on pacing, but I noticed that he turned pale, and several times after that he looked at me, growing paler and paler, till at last, making up his mind, he came to me: I never saw anyone so ghastly gaunt! he frightened me! And what do you think his Grace said, sir? 'Well, pretty, do you love me?'"

"Dr Burton? said that? 'well, pretty, do you love me?'"

"Yes, he said it—in such a secret voice; and he was pale, pale...."

"But—what did you say?"

"My answer was a scream, sir, for the words had hardly passed his lips when he was on the ground in a fit. The doctors say, by the way, that if ever he has another, he will slip his cable."

Some of Rosie's phrases were not utterly pretty, and her anecdotes so numerous that one doubted whether they could be all quite true; but, assuming this of Dr Burton to have at least some truth, I was very shocked, very deeply moved, and I got from her a promise not again to mention it during the doctor's lifetime.

When I asked her what was the big thing at the moment in England, "Oh, still Education," she answered in her off-hand manner: "it is nearly through the Commons now, but the Church isn't going to hear of it. This bill puts an Eton education within the reach of every boy, as in France and elsewhere, and it does seem hard that the Church should stand in the way when anyone can see that England is perishing for lack of just this thing: but that is the Church all over—the old enemy of light." "Why, Rosie, you are not a good Catholic!" I said. "Oh, well," said she, "one must submit one's reason to God, of course; but still, one's private thoughts will peep through. However, the Church was defeated over Diseased Persons, and she may be over Education, too: Mr Edwards, I know, means fight, and so does the duchess." "But Diseased Persons was won through the discovery of that body and cross in Bayeux," said I: "do people, by the way, still discuss that discovery?" "Nothing has ever been made of it that I know of," she answered: "but some queer things were said, as some queer things were said of the disappearance of Dr Todhunter, and it gave a shock to the Church somehow, till two more of the visions were seen, and that turned people's minds away."

On the whole, the girl proved a mine of modernity: but what causes me to mention her here is a criticism of some of her words made by Langler, and a meditation which occurred in my mind in consequence of that criticism, not without definite result.

On the night of our meeting I mentioned her in my usual letter to Langler, and in his next to me were the following words:—"This Rosie, you tell me, says that Baron KolÁr is not at Schweinstein: but you and I believe differently! That voice and those two English words which you heard on the night when we were saved from drowning, and that light in (?) the castle laboratory on the night when we saw Max Dees—these, indeed, are hardly proofs; yet we do have a feeling that he is there: and I have asked myself what can be his reason for hiding his presence there, if he is there, even from political people like the Duchess of St Albans. The reason suggested to my mind is that he may really mean to do Max Dees some harm, with the odium of which he does not wish to be afterwards pestered. Dees, it seems, has somehow wronged him, and vengeance is to be taken. But why, then, one might ask, does the man not take his vengeance and be done? It seems to be because Dees is being reserved till something else first happens, till (according to Dees himself) 'the downfall of the Church.' But, in that case, why is the baron at present lurking in Schweinstein? Perhaps it is in order to hurt Dees prematurely, before 'the downfall,' in case you and I should make serious headway in the matter of effecting Dees' release. But if this be so, it would seem to show that the baron must have some real fear of our power to release Dees. Indeed, he has such a fear: why else did he hurry hither the moment he saw that we could no longer be kept away from Styria? How sensitive he must be of the least chance of Dees' escaping him! Yet he is not a nervous man; one would imagine that he might securely have left Dees to the care of the watch-dog Tschudi! But no, he flies to the spot in person. And those two outrages upon the innocent hands—how sensitive, how frightfully in earnest he must have been to keep us from meddling! But that earnestness certainly implies a fear of our power—of our power, which seems to be nil. It must be, then, that the baron perceives that we have some power of which we ourselves are not aware."

There Langler's discernment seems to have stopped short; but his words so struck me, that I could not forget them, and after a sleepless night, which I shall ever remember, towards morning this thought was born in my head: "but Max Dees is a churchman! this is the heyday of the Church, so it is through the Church perhaps that his release may be wrought; and the baron, more far-seeing than we, has long seen this, and has feared our power, because it seemed certain to him that we, too, must see it! Here have I been tossed from Herr to Herr and from pillar to post; but the Prince-bishop of Seckau is in Gratz, and it is to him perhaps that I should have gone."

Thus oddly, one might say awfully, do things come off: if I had not met that girl in the Stadt Park I might never have come at this meditation, and everything, in the end, would have been otherwise than it was.