ut I am sorry. Can I do anything?"

"Otto," he said, with difficulty.

"You want to see him?

"No."

She knew what he meant by that. He would have the boy remember him as he
had seen him last.

"You are anxious about him?"

"Very--anxious."

"Listen, father," she said, stooping over him. "I have been hard and
cold. Perhaps you will grant that I have had two reasons for it. But I
am going to do better. I will take care of him and I will do all I can
to make him happy. I promise."

Perhaps it was relief. Perhaps even then the thought of Annunciata's
tardy and certain-to-be bungling efforts to make Ferdinand William Otto
happy amused him. He smiled faintly.

Nikky, watching his rooms being dismantled, rescuing an old pipe now and
then, or a pair of shabby but beloved boots,--Nikky, whistling to keep
up his courage, received a note from Hedwig late that afternoon. It was
very brief:

To-night at nine o'clock I shall go to the roof beyond
Hubert's old rooms, for air.
HEDWIG.

Nikky, who in all his incurious young life had never thought of the roof
of the Palace, save as a necessary shelter from the weather, a thing of
tiles and gutters, vastly large, looked rather astounded.

"The roof!" he said, surveying the note. And fell to thinking, such a
mixture of rapture and despair as only twenty-three, and hopeless, can
know.

Somehow or other he got through the intervening hours, and before nine
he was on his way. He had the run of the Palace, of course. No one
noticed him as he made his way toward the empty suite which so recently
had housed its royal visitor. Annunciata's anxiety had kept the doors of
the suite unlocked. Knowing nothing, but fearing everything, she slept
with the key to the turret door under her pillow, and an ear opened for
untoward sounds.

In the faint moonlight poor Hubert's rooms, with their refurbished
furnishings covered with white linen, looked cold and almost terrifying.
A long window was open, and the velvet curtain swayed as though it
shielded some dismal figure. But, when he had crossed the room and drawn
the curtain aside, it was to see a bit of fairyland, the roof moonlit
and transformed by growing things into a garden. There was, too, the
fairy.

Hedwig, in a soft white wrap over her dinner dress, was at the
balustrade. The moon, which had robbed the flowers of their colors and
made them ghosts of blossoms, had turned Hedwi