n a pair of gray
eyes when they were lifted; the beating of a girl's heart near him;
the springtime grace of a girl's sweet youth in its contrast with the
voluptuous summer of Rhaetian types of beauty; the warm rose that
spread upwards from a girl's childlike dimples to the womanly arch of
her brows; all these charms and more which rendered one girl a hundred
times adorable, took hold of him, and made him not an Emperor, but a
man, unarmored.

When the music ceased, he fancied for an instant that some accident
had befallen the musicians. Then, when he realized that the end of the
dance had come in its due time, he remembered with pleasure a rule of
his court, established in the days of those who had been before him.
After each dance an interval of ten minutes was allowed before the
beginning of another. Ten minutes are not much to a man who has things
to say which could hardly be said in ten hours; still, they are
something; and to waste even one would be like spilling a drop of
precious elixir from a tiny bottle containing but nine other drops.

They had scarcely spoken yet, except for commonplaces which any one
might have overheard, since the day on the mountain; and in this first
moment of the ten, each was wondering whether or no that day should be
ignored between them. Leopold did not feel that it should be spoken
of, for it was possible that the girl did not recognize the chamois
hunter in the Emperor; and Virginia did not feel that she could speak
of it. But then, few things turn out as people feel they should.

Next to the throne room was the ball-room; and beyond was another
known as the "Waldsaal," which Leopold had fitted up for the
gratification of a fancy. It was named the "Waldsaal" because it
represented a wood. Walls and ceiling were masked with thick-growing
creepers trained over invisible wires, through which peeped stars of
electric light, like the chequerings of sunshine between netted
branches. Trees grew up, with their roots in boxes hidden beneath the
moss-covered floor. There were grottoes of ivy-draped rock in the
corners, and here and there out from leafy shadows glittered the glass
eyes of birds and animals--eagles, stags, chamois, wolves and
bears--which the Emperor had shot.

This strange room, so vast as to seem empty when dozens of people
wandered beneath its trees and among its rock grottoes, was thrown
open to guests whenever a ball was given at the palace; but the
conservatories an