ternoon, when the young Queen of Holland came to the concert with
the queen-mother, Lottie cast her prejudices to the winds in accepting
the places which the wicked fellow-countryman offered Boyne and herself,
when they had failed to get any where they could see the queens, as the
Dutch called them.

The hotel was draped with flags, and banked with flowers about the
main entrance where the queens were to arrive, and the guests massed
themselves in a dense lane for them to pass through. Lottie could
not fail to be one of the foremost in this array, and she was able
to decide, when the queens had passed, that the younger would not be
considered a more than average pretty girl in America, and that she was
not very well dressed. They had all stood within five feet of her, and
Boyne had appropriated one of the prettiest of the pretty bends which
the gracious young creature made to right and left, and had responded to
it with an 'empressement' which he hoped had not been a sacrifice of his
republican principles.

During the concert he sat with his eyes fixed upon the Queen where she
sat in the royal box, with her mother and her ladies behind her, and
wondered and blushed to wonder if she had noticed him when he bowed, or
if his chivalric devotion in applauding her when the audience rose to
receive her had been more apparent than that of others; whether it had
seemed the heroic act of setting forth at the head of her armies, to
beat back a German invasion, which it had essentially been, with his
instantaneous return as victor, and the Queen's abdication and adoption
of republican principles under conviction of his reasoning, and her
idolized consecration as the first chief of the Dutch republic. His
cheeks glowed, and he quaked at heart lest Lottie should surprise his
thoughts and expose them to that sarcastic acquaintance, who proved to
be a medical student resting at Scheveningen from the winter's courses
and clinics in, Vienna. He had already got on to many of Boyne's curves,
and had sacrilegiously suggested the Queen of Holland when he found him
feeding his fancy on the modern heroical romances; he advised him as an
American adventurer to compete with the European princes paying court
to her. So thin a barrier divided that malign intelligence from Boyne's
most secret dreams that he could never feel quite safe from him, and yet
he was always finding himself with him, now that he was separated from
Miss Rasmith, and Mr. Bre