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Updated: May 27, 2025
The Ambassador, Prince Terniloff, was bidding farewell to his wife's cousin, the Princess Eiderstrom, the last of his guests. She drew him on one side for a moment. "Your Excellency," she said, "I have been hoping for a word with you all the evening." "And I with you, dear Stephanie," he answered. "It is very early. Let us sit down for a moment."
"Unless," Dominey said thoughtfully, "the desire for war should come, not from Downing Street but from Potsdam." "We serve an honourable master," Terniloff declared sternly, "and he has shown me his mind. His will is for peace, and for the great triumphs to which our country is already entitled by reason of her supremacy in industry, in commerce, in character and in genius.
I take it for granted that as a man of honour it will be your duty to offer her your hand in marriage, sooner or later. I see no harm in anticipating a few months, if by that means we can pacify her. Terniloff would arrange it at the Embassy. He is devoted to her, and it will strengthen your position with him." Dominey turned away towards the stairs.
"I should think very possibly that you are right," Dominey assented, as the young man passed on with a farewell salute. Terniloff looked after him curiously. "It is the type of young man, that," he declared, "which we cannot understand. What would happen to him, in the event of a war?
"You are at least consistent, Prince," Dominey remarked. Terniloff smiled. "That is because I have been taken behind the scenes," he said. "I have been shown, as is the privilege of ambassadors, the mind of our rulers. You, my friend," he went on, "spent your youth amongst the military faction. You think that you are the most important people in Germany. Well, you are not.
"I have already confided the result of my morning despatches to the Prime Minister," Terniloff observed. "I went through them before I came down here," was the somewhat doubtful reply. "You will have appreciated, I hope, their genuinely pacific tone?" Terniloff asked anxiously. His interlocutor bowed and then drew himself up.
Terniloff was for a moment unusually pale. It was an episode of unrecorded history. He rose to his feet and raised his hat. "There will be no war," he said solemnly. The Cabinet Minister passed on with a lighter step. Dominey, more clearly than ever before, understood the subtle policy which had chosen for his great position a man as chivalrous and faithful and yet as simple-minded as Terniloff.
"Terniloff is the dove of peace," the Kaiser pronounced. "He carries the sprig of olive in his mouth. My statesmen and counsellors would have sent to London an ambassador with sterner qualities. I preferred not. Terniloff is the man to gull fools, because he is a fool himself.
"Von Ragastein," he groaned, "I am a broken man!" Dominey grasped his hand sympathetically. Terniloff seemed to have aged years even in the last few hours. "I sent for you," he continued, "to say farewell, to say farewell and make a confession. You were right, and I was wrong. It would have better if I had remained and played the country farmer on my estates.
Middleton glanced at his horn-rimmed watch. "There's another hour's good light, sir," he said. "Would you care about a partridge drive, or should we do through the home copse?" "If I might make a suggestion," Terniloff observed diffidently, "most of the pheasants went into that gloomy-looking wood just across the marshes." There was a moment's rather curious silence.
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