the guard-of-honour formed by the throne-guards,
through the purple draperies and the flags, the crowd were able to see
something of the meeting of the sovereigns in the pavilion. They shouted
their hurrahs; and then the procession drove to the Imperial, the
emperor with the King of Syria in the first carriage, the empress with
the queen in the next; after these, the landaus with the princes and
princesses and the suite.

A series of festivals and displays followed. After the tragedies of the
inundations and the parliamentary crisis, a mood of gaiety blew over the
capital, as it glittered in the sun, and lasted till late in the lighted
rooms and parks of the Imperial. This gaiety was because of the eastern
queen. The King of Syria may have had a few drops of the blood of
Solomon still flowing through his veins. But the queen was not of royal
descent. She was the daughter of a Syrian magnate and her mother's name
was not mentioned in the _Almanach de Gotha_. That mother was doubtless
a favourite of dubious noble descent, but nobody knew who she had been
exactly. A _demi-mondaine_ from Paris or Vienna, who had stranded in the
east and made her fortune in the harem of some great Syrian? A
half-European, half-Egyptian dancer from a Cairene or Alexandrian
dancing-house? Whoever she was, her lucky daughter, the Queen of Syria,
showed an unmistakable mixture of blood, something at once eastern and
European. Next to the true Semitic type of the king, who possessed a
certain nervous dignity in his half-European, half-oriental uniform
glittering with diamonds, the queen, short, fat, chubby, pale-brown, had
the exuberant smiles, the restless movements, the turning head and
rolling eyes of a woman of colour. Her very first appearance, as she sat
in the carriage, next to the delicate figure of the Empress Elizabeth,
in a gaudy travelling-dress and a hat with great feathers, bowing and
laughing on every side with profuse amiability, had affected the
Liparians, accustomed to the calm haughtiness of their own rulers, with
an apparently inextinguishable gaiety. The Queen of Syria became the
universal topic of conversation; and every conversation referring to her
was accented with a smile of wickedness. Withal she seemed so entirely
good-natured that it was impossible to say a word against her; and
people were only amused about her. They remembered that the Syrians had
subscribed fabulous sums at the time of the inundations. And the
merr