"What is the matter?" exclaimed Sylvia. "Anything wrong with Fritz?"
"No—no—nothing in the least wrong," murmured the Grand Duchess 13 absent-mindedly. "Far from it, indeed; but really—this is the most extraordinary coincidence. It seems almost too strange that it should come at such a moment. Yet I suppose I am not dreaming?" She peered questioningly at Sylvia; for it must be confessed that the Grand Duchess did sometimes sleep, perchance even dream, in the warm seclusion of the old riverside garden.
"Life is a dream!" hummed the Princess. "But you look awake, dear; and I've never known you to talk whole sentences in your sleep. What has Fritz been doing?"
"It is not Fritz; it's your emperor," returned her mother.
It was now Sylvia's turn to flush. This, then, was the "coincidence"! She wished, yet vaguely dreaded, to ask for the purport of the news. Of course it was ridiculous to blush, because it was ridiculous to care. But the fact remained that she did blush and that she did care.
Princess Sylvia had never seen Maximilian of Rhaetia; nevertheless, as she had half laughingly, half earnestly declared, he had been for her 14 the one real man in a world of shadow men, since childish days. In the little room grandiloquently called her "study" (a room sacred to herself alone, whose secrets even her mother did not share) were preserved many souvenirs of the Emperor, which had been accumulating for years. There were paragraphs cut from newspapers, setting forth his great prowess as a soldier, hunter, and mountaineer, with dramatic anecdotes of his haughty courage when in danger. There were portraits of Maximilian, beginning from an early age, up to the present, when he was shown as a tall, stern-eyed, passionate-lipped, aggressive-chinned young man of thirty. There were copies of pictures he had painted, plays he had written, music he had composed, fierce and warlike speeches he had delivered; accounts of improvements in guns and gun powder invented by him; with numerous other records of his accomplishments and achievements; for the Emperor of Rhaetia was, in his own mind, and that of his people, the one shining exception to the rule that a "Jack of all trades can be master of none." He was master 15 of all, or at least all he had ever attempted—their name being legion—and Sylvia loved him because it was so. The locked drawers of her desk were hallowed by the records of her hero which they hid.
Now, the thought that flashed into her mind was that Fritz's letter might perhaps contain a gossiping account of the Emperor's engagement to one of those other Royal girls, who, as the Grand Duchess had justly observed, were more suitable to match him than poor, pretty little Princess Sylvia of Eltzburg-Neuwald. Maximilian was thirty years old (Sylvia knew his age to the day, almost to the hour); therefore it was remarkable that he had not long ago listened to the advice of his Chancellor and chosen a wife worthy to be Empress of Rhaetia and the mother of an heir.
"Guess what Fritz writes of him," said the Grand Duchess, controlling visible emotion.
Sylvia also controlled hers, crushing it down with a relentless hand, and telling herself that what she felt was at its worst but wounded vanity.