So there were no gifts. None, that is, until the riding-hour came, and Nikky, subverter of all discipline. He had brought a fig lady, wrapped in paper.
“It’s quite fresh,” he said, as they walked together across the Place. “I’ll give it to you when we get to the riding-school. I saw the woman myself take it out of her basket. So it has no germs on it.”
But, although he spoke bravely, Nikky was the least bit nervous. First of all he was teaching the boy deception. “But why don’t they treat him like a human being?” he demanded of himself. Naturally there was no answer. Maria Menrad’s son had a number of birthdays in his mind, real birthdays with much indulgence connected with them.
Second, suppose it really had a germ or two on it? Anxiously, having unwrapped it, he examined it in the sunlight of a window of the ring. Certainly, thus closely inspected, it looked odd. There were small granules over it.
The Crown Prince waited patiently. “Miss Braithwaite says that if you look at them under a glass, there are bugs on them,” he observed, with interest.
“Perhaps, after all, you’d better not have it.”
“They are very small bugs,” said Prince Ferdinand William Otto anxiously. “I don’t object to them at all.”
So, after all, Nikky uneasily presented his gift; and nothing untoward happened. He was rewarded, however, by such a glow of pleasure and gratitude from the boy that his scruples faded.
No Hedwig again, to distract Nikky’s mind. The lesson went on; trot, canter, low jumps. And then what Nikky called “stunts,” an American word which delighted the Crown Prince.
But, Nikky, like the big child he was himself, had kept his real news to the last.