“We might as well play ball now.”
Prince Ferdinand William Otto turned away from the parapet with a sigh. This strange quiet that filled the Palace seemed to have attacked Nikky too. Otto hated quiet.
They played ball, and the Crown Prince took a lesson in curves. But on his third attempt, he described such a compound—curve that the ball disappeared over an adjacent part of the roof, and although Nikky did some blood-curdling climbing along gutters, it could not be found.
It was then that the Majordomo, always a marvelous figure in crimson and gold, and never seen without white gloves—the Majordomo bowed in a window, and observed that if His Royal Highness pleased, His Royal Highness’s luncheon was served.
In the shrouded room inside the windows, however, His Royal Highness paused and looked around.
“I’ve been here before,” he observed. “These were my father’s rooms. My mother lived here, too. When I am older, perhaps I can have them. It would be convenient on account of my practicing curves on the roof. But I should need a number of balls.”
He was rather silent on his way back to the schoolroom. But once he looked up rather wistfully at Nikky.
“If they were living,” he said, “I am pretty sure they would take me out to-day.”
Olga Loschek had found the day one of terror. Annunciata had demanded her attendance all morning, had weakened strangely and demanded fretfully to be comforted.
“I have been a bad daughter,” she would say. “It was my nature. I was warped and soured by wretchedness.”