l. To add to the
complications, Miss Braithwaite had a headache.

Nikky Larisch had arrived just as Hedwig departed, and even the Crown
Prince had recognized something wrong. Nikky had stopped just inside the
doorway, with his eyes rather desperately and hungrily on Hedwig, and
Hedwig, who should have been scolded, according to Prince Otto, had
passed him with the haughtiest sort of nod.

The Crown Prince witnessed the nod with wonder and alarm.

"We are all rather worried," he explained afterward to Nikky, to soothe
his wounded pride. "My grandfather is not so well to-day. Hedwig is very
unhappy."

"Yes," said Nikky miserably, "she does look unhappy."

"Now, when are we going out?" briskly demanded Prince Ferdinand William
Otto. "I can hardly wait. I've seen the funniest people already--and
dogs. Nikky, I wonder if you could dress Toto, and let me see him
somewhere."

"Out! You do not want to go out in that crowd, do you?"

"Why--am I not to go?"

His voice was suddenly quite shaky. He was, in a way, so inured to
disappointments that he recognized the very tones in which they were
usually announced. So he eyed Nikky with a searching glance, and saw
there the thing he feared.

"Well," he said resignedly, "I suppose I can see something from the
windows. Only--I should like to have a really good time occasionally."
He was determined not to cry. "But there are usually a lot of people in
the Place."

Then, remembering that his grandfather was very ill, he tried to forget
his disappointment in a gift for him. Not burnt wood this time, but the
drawing of a gun, which he explained as he worked, that he had invented.
He drew behind the gun a sort of trestle, with little cars, not unlike
the Scenic Railway, on which ammunition was delivered into the breech by
something strongly resembling a coal-chute.

There was, after all, little to see from the windows. That part of the
Place near the Palace remained empty and quiet, by order of the King's
physicians. And although it was Carnival, and the streets were thronged
with people, there was little of Carnival in the air. The city waited.

Some loyal subjects waited and grieved that the King lay dying. For,
although the Palace had carefully repressed his condition, such things
leak out, and there was the empty and silent Place to bear witness.

Others waited, too, but not in sorrow. And a certain percentage, the
young and light-hearted, strutted the streets in fantasti