Page:Anthony Hope - The Kings Mirror.djvu/209

lations between us in those days were strange. We did not quarrel, we felt a friendliness for one another. Each knew the price the other paid or must pay as well as he knew his own price. But we were rivals. Varvilliers was wrong when he said that Coralie cared nothing about Wetter. She cared, although it was in a peculiar fashion that she cared. Truly he could give her little, but he was to her a sign and a testimony of her power, even as I myself in another way. Mine was the high rank, the great position. In conquering me lay the open and notorious triumph, but she was not insensible to the more private joy and secret exultation that came to her from dominating a ruling mind, and filling with her own image a head capacious enough to hold imperial policies and shape the destinies of kingdoms. Wetter and I, each in our way, broke through the crust of seemingly consistent frivolity that was on her, and down to a deep-seated tendency toward romance and the love of power. She could not rule directly, but she could rule rulers. I am certain that some such idea was in her head, alloying, or at least refining, a grosser self-interest. Therefore Wetter, no less than I, was of value to her. She would not willingly have let him go, even although he could give her nothing and she did not care for him in the only sense of which my friend the Vicomte took account. I came to realize how it was between her and him before very long, and to see how the same ultimate instinct of her nature made her long to gather both him and me into her net. Thus she would have bowing before her the highest and the strongest heads in Forstadt. That she so analyzed and reasoned out her wishes it would be absurd to suppose, but we—he and—I performed the task for her. Each knew