might after all be for him, and he
took enormous pleasure in the thought that he was falling in love with
a girl who had captured the Emperor's heart.

Egon glanced very often at Leopold, contrasting his sovereign's
appearance unfavorably with his own. The Emperor was thin and dark,
with a grave cast of feature, while Egon's face kept the color and
youthfulness of the early twenties. He was older than Leopold, but he
looked a boy. Alma Tadema would have wreathed him with vine leaves,
draped him with tiger skins, and set him down on a marble bench
against a burning sapphire sky, where he would have appeared more
suitably clad than in the stiff blue and silver uniform of a crack
Rhaetian regiment.

Leopold, on the contrary, would never be painted except as a soldier;
and it seemed to Egon that no normal girl could help thinking him a
far handsomer fellow than the Emperor. For the moment, of course,
Miss Mowbray did not notice him, because his Imperial Majesty loomed
large in the foreground of her imagination; but the Chancellor had
evidently a plan in his head for removing that stately obstacle into
the dim perspective.

Egon had not heard Miss Mowbray spoken of as an heiress, therefore,
even had there been no Emperor in the way, he would not have worshiped
at the shrine. But now, behold the shrine, attractive before, newly
and alluringly decked! Egon wondered much over his half-brother's
apparently impulsive offer, and the contradictory command, which had,
a little later, enjoined waiting.

He was delighted, however, that he had not been forbidden to make
himself agreeable; and his idea was, as soon as dinner should be over,
to find a place at Miss Mowbray's side before any other man should
have time to take it. But unluckily for this plan, Baron von Lyndal
detained him for a few moments with praise of a new remedy which might
cure the Chancellor's gout; and when he escaped from his host to look
for Miss Mowbray in the white drawing-room she was not there.

From the music room adjoining, however, came sounds which drew him
toward the door. He knew Miss Mowbray's soft, coaxing touch on the
piano: she was there, "playing in a whisper," as he had heard her call
it. Perhaps she was going to sing, as she had once or twice before,
and would need some one to turn the pages of her music. Egon thought
that he would much like to be the some one, and was in the act of
parting the white velvet portieres that covered the doorw