"The Princess had important business in town, and I went with her."
"Important business in town! She never said a word to me about it. Was she in the accident too?"
"Yes, but luckily she didn't get a scratch. And of course this is only a slight superficial wound."
The slight superficial wound did its best to contradict me by throbbing vilely.
Ferdinand the Twelfth sat on the right of his hostess, his Chancellor on her left. It is the due, I think, of our recent and temporarily imported culinary artist, lately in the service of a nobleman, to say that he had done extremely well in trying circumstances. There is no sauce like hunger, of course, but it was observed that the King ate heartily, and, although verging upon the statutory term of human life, seemed not one penny the worse for his long and trying journey.
He spoke English with an agreeable fluency. Not only did he know this country very well indeed, but we gathered that he was accustomed to find it pleasant. Seen across a dinner-table it was clear that his portraits had not in the least exaggerated his natural picturesqueness. It was a noble, leonine head, a thing of power and virility, framed with a mane of white hair. His eyes were heavy-lidded, but deep-seeing and almost uncomfortably direct and penetrating in their gaze; yet where one might have expected calculation and cold detachment there was an impenetrable veil of kindliness which served to obscure the elemental forces which must have lurked beneath.
There were tomatoes among the hors-d'oeuvres, and there were tomatoes in the soup. When the Victor of Rodova made a significant departure from the custom of our land by smacking his lips and astonishing the impassive Parkins by saying, "Make my compliments to de chef upon his consommé; I will haf more," his hostess hoisted the ensign of the rose, and her Royal Highness beamed upon her.
"There, Irene! what did I not tell you, my child?" she exclaimed triumphantly.
"Oliver has a devil of a twist upon him, evidently," murmured the son-in-law of Ferdinand the Twelfth, in an aside to his host of such deplorable banality that an apology is offered for its appearance in these pages. "I wish it would choke the old swine."
"On the contrary, he seems a quite kindly and paternal old gentleman."