great adorable day, and of all
the great adorable days that were to be his.

He leaned out from his window, drinking the dawn in. The gods had
made merry over him, had they? And the cry of the hyena had made night
hideous. Well, it was his turn now. He would laugh last and loudest.

And already, for what was to be, he laughed outright into the morning;
insomuch that the birds in the trees of Trinity, and still more the
Emperors over the way, marvelled greatly.

XIV

They had awaited thousands and innumerable thousands of daybreaks in the
Broad, these Emperors, counting the long slow hours till the night were
over. It is in the night especially that their fallen greatness haunts
them. Day brings some distraction. They are not incurious of the lives
around them--these little lives that succeed one another so quickly. To
them, in their immemorial old age, youth is a constant wonder. And so
is death, which to them comes not. Youth or death--which, they had often
asked themselves, was the goodlier? But it was ill that these two things
should be mated. It was ill-come, this day of days.

Long after the Duke was in bed and asleep, his peal of laughter echoed
in the ears of the Emperors. Why had he laughed?

And they said to themselves "We are very old men, and broken, and in a
land not our own. There are things that we do not understand."

Brief was the freshness of the dawn. From all points of the compass,
dark grey clouds mounted into the sky. There, taking their places
as though in accordance to a strategic plan laid down for them, they
ponderously massed themselves, and presently, as at a given signal,
drew nearer to earth, and halted, an irresistible great army, awaiting
orders.

Somewhere under cover of them the sun went his way, transmitting a
sulphurous heat. The very birds in the trees of Trinity were oppressed
and did not twitter. The very leaves did not whisper.

Out through the railings, and across the road, prowled a skimpy and
dingy cat, trying to look like a tiger.

It was all very sinister and dismal.

The hours passed. The Broad put forth, one by one, its signs of waking.

Soon after eight o'clock, as usual, the front-door of the Duke's
lodgings was opened from within. The Emperors watched for the faint
cloud of dust that presently emerged, and for her whom it preceded. To
them, this first outcoming of the landlady's daughter was a moment of
daily interest. Katie!--they had known her as a t