ld
never have demanded this of Othomar--"I have been excellently received:
General Ducardi, Leoni, Fasti, our worthy minister and Siridsen...."

"Othomar will be sorry all the same," said the empress. "He is out
driving now with Thera. Thera is driving her new bays. I can't
understand why they went; it is sure to rain!"

The empress resumed her seat, with an anxious look at the weather
outside; the prince and Helene likewise sat down. A cross-fire of
enquiries after the two families was kindled between the empress and her
nephew; they had not seen each other for months. There was much to be
discussed; the times were full of disaster; and the empress showed a
long telegram which the emperor had sent from Altara about the
inundations. Her fingers shook as they held the message.

She was still a woman of remarkable beauty, in spite of her grown-up
children. But the charm of her beauty was apparent to very few. In
public that beauty acquired a hardness as of a cameo: fine, clear-cut
lines; great, cold, brown eyes, without expression; a cold, closed
mouth; before people her slender figure assumed something stiff and
automatic; she even showed herself thus before the more intimate circles
of the court. But when she was seen, as now, in the seclusion of her own
drawing-room, with no one except her nephew, whom she loved almost as
much as her own children, and one little lady-in-waiting whom she
spoilt, then, in spite of the dread which she repressed deep down in her
heart, she became another woman. In her simple grey silk--she was in
slight mourning for a relation--what was stiff and automatic in her
figure changed into a gracious suppleness of carriage and movement, as
spontaneous as the other was studied; the cameo of her face became
animated; a look almost of melancholy came into her eyes; and, above
all, a laugh about that cold, hard mouth was as a gleam of sympathy that
rendered her unrecognizable to one who had seen her for the first time
cold, stiff and austere.

Prince Herman of Gothland was the second son of her sister, the Queen of
Gothland. A tall, sturdy lad in his undress uniform as a naval
lieutenant, with the healthy, Teutonic fairness of the house of
Gothland: a firm neck, broad shoulders, the swelling chest of an
athlete, the determined quickness of movement of a lively nature, more
than sufficient intelligence in his large grey eyes with the black
pupils and with now and then a single pleasant, soft note