"The New England section of America, I believe. Her mother died when Joan was a child; her father was in the navy and was drowned."
"An artist, you say?"
"Artistic would be the better description. She is too rich ever to paint well."
"Rich!"
"As artists go. She has an income of two hundred pounds a year."
"Ah, bah!"
"Don't be so contemptuous of five thousand francs. They go a long way—with care. I believe that my dear Joan spends all her money on dress, and keeps soup in the pot by copying pictures. But she will make a lovely Queen. Saperlotte! I must paint her in purple and ermine."
Yielding to the spell of the vision thus conjured up, Felix forgot his racked nerves and sang lustily a stanza from "Masaniello." Prince Michael flung out of the room to meet his son; but the strains followed him down the stairs.
Yet Poluski was thinking while he sang, and the burden of his thought was that this anxious father had asked him no word as to the scene in that bullet swept room, nor the means whereby Alec and his friends were snatched from death.
Very different was the meeting between Joan and Princess Delgrado. The panic stricken mother, scarce crediting the assurance given her by the President's family that there were no grounds for the disquieting rumors that arose from Sobieski's appeal for help, was in an agony of dread when the first undoubted version of the true occurrence was brought by Stampoff's courier.