I pressed her hand and kissed it. With a sudden seeming formality she curtseyed and kissed mine.
"I don't forget what you are," she said, "because I have fancied you as something besides. Good-bye, sire. Good-bye, Augustin."
"There's a name wanting."
"Ah, to Cæsar I said good-bye five years ago." The tears were in her eyes as I turned away and left her.
I had a fancy to walk back alone, as I had walked alone from her house on the day when I cut the bond between us that same five years ago. Having dismissed my carriage, I set out in the cool of the autumn evening as dusk had just fallen, and took my way through the decorated streets. Only three days more lay between the decorations and the occasion they were meant to grace. There was a hum of gaiety through all the town; they had begun their holiday-making, and the shops did splendid trade. They in Forstadt would have liked to marry me every year. Why not? I was to them a sign, a symbol, something they saw and spoke of, but not a man. I reviewed the troops every year. Why should I not be married every year? It would be but the smallest extension of my functions, and all on the lines of logic. I could imagine Princess Heinrich according amplest approval to the scheme.
Suddenly, as I passed in meditation through a quiet street, a hand was laid on my shoulder. I knew only one man who would stop me in that way. Was he here again, risen again, in Forstadt again, for work, or mirth, or mischief? He came in fitting with the visit I had paid. I turned and found his odd, wry smile on me, the knit brows and twinkling eyes. He lifted his hat and tossed back the iron-gray hair.
"I am come to the wedding, sire," said he, bowing.
"It would be incomplete without you, Wetter."
"And for another thing—for a treat, for a spectacle. They've written an epithalamium, haven't they?"
"Yes, some fool, according to his folly."