If Sylvia had been given time to think, she might have prepared an answer. But given no time, she told only the bald truth. "I couldn't help it."
He looked straight into her eyes. "You couldn't help risking your life 122 to——" He did not finish.
"It was to save——" Her words also died incomplete.
Then it was that he forgot various restrictions of etiquette which an Emperor, in conversing with a commoner—be the commoner man or woman—is not supposed to neglect.
For one thing, his voice grew unsteady, and his tone was eager as that of some ineligible subaltern with the girl of his first love.
"There is something I should like to show you," he said. Opening a button of the military coat, blazing with jewels and orders, he drew out a loop of thin gold chain. At the end dangled some small object that flashed under a star of electric light.
"My ring!" exclaimed Sylvia in a breathless whisper.
Thus perished the Emperor's intention to ignore the day that had been theirs in the past.
"Your ring. You gave it to Max; he has kept it. He will always keep it. Are you surprised?"
Sylvia wished to say "Yes," but instead she answered "No," because 123 pretty fibs require preparation; it is only the truth that speaks itself.