"So I was thinking," hopefully responded Sylvia. "And when the crowd opens for him, if we're clever, it may open for us too. He's a hateful-looking man, and I have taken a dislike to him without a sight of his face; but we must use him as if he were a Cairene cyce."
"He really is going through!" exclaimed Miss M'Pherson.
They were close upon their unconscious pioneer now; and as—in peremptory tones—he informed the human wall that it must divide to let him pass, because he had come with a special message to the Lord Chancellor from the Burgomaster, the Princess Sylvia of Eltzburg- Neuwald could have laid her hands upon the gray shoulders, epauletted 90 with red.
The wall obeyed, evidently recognizing the authority of his uniform. "It must be the secretary of Herr Hermann, the Burgomaster," Sylvia heard one man murmur knowingly to another. "Something of importance has, perhaps, been forgotten, or special news has been received and must be reported."
Good-naturedly the crowd gave way for the new comer; and, to Sylvia's joy, she was sucked into the whirlpool in his wake. Near the front, people would have stopped her if they could, knowing that she, at least, had no official right of entrance; but at the critical instant the blue-and-silver uniformed band of Rhaetia's crack regiment, the "Kaiser's Own," struck up an air which told them the Emperor was approaching. Angry ones were content with keeping out the tall, thin English spinster in tweed, hustling and pushing her into the background, when she would shrilly have protested in her native tongue that "really, really she must be allowed to pass with her friend!"
The man who had announced his mission from the Burgomaster must have 91 felt that someone pressed after him with particularity, for, as he reached the front rank on the densely packed pavement, he wheeled sharply round. Sylvia, her little chin almost resting on his shoulder, met his gaze, shrinking away from the breath that swept hot across her cheek.
"Just the face I gave his back credit for," she thought ungratefully. "Sly and cruel, brutal, too—and, how curiously pale!"
A pair of black eyes, small, glassy, with a peculiar flatness of the cornea, had aimed at her a glance of suspicion; and she seemed still to feel their penetrating stare, when the face was turned away again. Having obtained his desire—a position in the front rank of the spectators, and incidentally a place for Sylvia too—the man in gray and red proceeded to take from his breast a roll of parchment, tied with narrow ribbon and sealed with a crimson seal.
Sylvia, standing shoulder to shoulder with him, had just time to wonder if the fellow were going to read some proclamation, when a great cheer arose from thousands of throats; men waved their hats; 92 peasant women held up their children, while ladies threw roses from the decorated balconies. A white figure on a white charger came riding into the square, under the gay-coloured triumphal arch of flags and flowers.
Others followed: men in rich dark uniforms, on coal-black horses; yet Sylvia saw only one, glittering white from head to foot, like hoar- frost in sunlight. Under the shining helmet of steel, the earnest face looked clear-cut as cameo. To the crowd he was the Kaiser—a fine, popular, clever young man, who ruled his country well, and, above all provided many a pleasing spectacle; to the girl he was an ideal St. George, strong and brave to slay modern dragons, right all crying wrongs.