Her Royal Lover: A Novel — page 175: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

HER ROYAL LOVER. 167 suppositions, and your testimony that, after having seen a man leap out of the window, you had tran- quilly returned to bed, instead of giving the alarm, has, in spite of the testimony of Geheimrath Schlotz, awakened many unjust suspicions against you.” The furious lightning which flashed in the eyes of Mineleko, at those words of the king, arrested, for a moment, the words upon his majesty’s lips. What! the king! the murderer himself, the am- bassador was thinking, dared to speak thus, to him, the innocent man! But he was too much accus- tomed to the habits of the court to interrupt the king, even by a syllable, until he had finished. Then, only raising his head and looking the king full in the face: “Ts it seriously,” said he, “that your majesty can (ah! how he emphasized this last word!) suspect me fora second of being the author of the murder of one of my most faithful servants, of a man who had been entirely devoted to my father?” “Certainly no! a thousand times no!” quickly re- sponded the king, “but you know as well as I what the journalism of to-day is. Nothing escapes it; the least detail of our private life belongs to it, they 1m- mediately seize upon it, and an account is given and delivered to the commentaries of everybody. An article, unfortunately turned, might inflame minds more ready to believe falsehood than the truth, and then——” “Your majesty forgets that I cannot absent my- self without the permission of my august master, the emperor.” “T have obviated that difficulty. It is scarcely half an hour ago since I sent a dispatch to my Eomichbooks.com