bove it, heavily, a sombre, grey sky, fraught
with storm and tragedy, like a leviathan in the firmament. And this grey
sky was full of mystery, full of destiny, of strange destiny: it
precipitated no thunder, but remained hanging over the city, merely
casting faint shadows over the brightness of its palaces, over the width
of its squares and streets, over the blue of its sea, its harbour, where
the ships, upright, still, anxious, raised their tall masts on high.

White, square, massive, amid the verdure of the Elizabeth Parks, in the
more intimate mystery of its own great plane-trees--the celebrated
plane-trees of Lipara, world-famed trees--stood the Imperial, the
emperor's palace, quasi-Moorish, with white, pointed arcades: it stood
as the civic crown of the capital, one great architectural jewel,
separated from the city, though standing in its very midst, by all that
park-like verdure.

The empress, Elizabeth of Liparia, sat in the private drawing-room of
her apartments in the right wing; she sat with a lady-in-waiting, the
Countess Helene of Thesbia. The windows were open; they opened on the
park; the famous plane-trees rose there, knotty with age,
wide-spreading, anxious, motionless with their trimmed leaves, between
which a dull-green twilight shimmered upon the lawns which ran into the
distance, rolling softly and smoothly, like tight-stretched velvet, into
an endless violet vista, with just here or there the one strident white
patch of a statue.

A great silence buzzed its strange sound of stillness indoors from the
park; it buzzed around the empress. She sat smiling; she listened to
Helene reading aloud; she tried to listen, she did not always
understand. A nervous dread haunted her, surrounded her, as with an
invisible net of meshes, unbreakable. This dread was for her husband,
her children, her elder son, her daughters, her younger boy. This dread
crept along the carpet beneath her feet; it hung from the ceiling above
her head, stole round about her through the whole room. This dread was
in the park: it came from afar, from the violet vistas; it swept over
the lawns and climbed in through the open windows; it fell from the
trees, it fell from the sky, the grey, thunder-laden sky. This dread
trembled through Liparia, through the whole of Liparia, through the
whole empire; it trembled in, in to the empress, enveloping her whole
being....

Then Elizabeth drew a deep breath and smiled. Helene had looked up to