“It is very handsome. But I am glad I am not the old King.” The boy picked up pails and brushes. “Nothing to look forward to but—that.”
“But much to look back on,” the man observed grimly, “and little that is good.”
The boy glanced through a window, below which the riding-ring stretched its brown surface, scarred by nervous hoofs. “I would change places with the Crown Prince,” he said enviously. “Listen to him! Always laughing. Never to labor, nor worry, nor think of the next day’s food—”
“Young fool!” The man came to his shoulder and glanced down also. “Would like to be a princeling, then! No worry. No trouble. Always play, play!” He gripped the boy’s shoulder. “Look, lad, at the windows about. That is what it is to be a prince. Wherever you look, what do you see? Stablemen? Grooms? Bah, secret agents, watching that no assassin, such perhaps as you and I, lurk about.”
The boy opened wide, incredulous eyes. “But who would attack a child?” he asked.
“There be those, nevertheless,” said the man mockingly. “Even a child may stand in the way of great changes.”
He stopped and stared, wiping the glass clear that he might see better. Nikky without his cap, disheveled and flushed with exertion, was making a frantic shot at the white ball, rolling past him. Where had he seen such a head, such a flying mop of hair? Ah! He remembered. It was the flying young devil who had attacked him and the others that night in the by-street, when Peter Niburg lay stunned!
Miss Braithwaite had a bad headache that afternoon, and the Crown Prince drove out with his aunt. The Archduchess Annunciata went shopping. Soon enough she would have Hedwig’s trousseau on her mind, so that day she bought for Hilda—Hilda whose long legs had a way of growing out of skirts, and who was developing a taste of her own in clothes.
So Hilda and her mother shopped endlessly, and the Crown Prince sat in the carriage and watched the people. The man beside the coachman sat with alert eyes, and there were others who scanned the crowd intently. But it was a quiet, almost an adoring crowd, and there was even a dog, to Prince Ferdinand William Otto’s huge delight.
The man who owned the dog, seeing the child’s eyes on him, put him through his tricks. Truly a wonderful dog, that would catch things on its nose and lie dead, rousing only to a whistle which its owner called Gabriel’s trumpet.