The Queen's hard, suspicious face never stirred a muscle. She leisurely inspected Thusis from head to toe, from toe to head without approval and without mercy.
"Are you the chamber maid?" she demanded coldly.
"My house-keeper and waitress, Madame," I explained. "Her name is Thusis."
The Queen stared intently at Thusis, then very insolently at me:
"Your house-keeper? Really," she said,—"your house-keeper? Fancy! One might almost doubt that such a very young girl could possess sufficient domestic experience for such an important position."
I turned red; not Thusis, however; and either the vulgar innuendo had left her quite unconscious, or she coolly scorned the implication. And she merely smiled upon the Hohenzollern and awaited her Prussian pleasure.
"Come on, Sophy," said King Constantine, with a covert leer at Thusis's ankles. And they all started upstairs, King Ferdinand shuffling in the rear with the peculiarly ponderous waddle which characterizes the progress of an elephant's hind quarters.
King Constantine halted on the stairs to turn and call back to me in his noisy, unceremonious, jovial way:
"Wait a bit, O'Ryan! I forgot to say that we're expecting some friends of ours. So fix 'em up in good shape when they——"
"Go on, Tino!" interrupted the queen impatiently. "Don't you even know enough to keep on going when you start? And God knows," she added in her disagreeable voice, "it's hard enough to start you."