as
counting the clouds for the misfortunes of the regime. This last
duty fell to the office of the lord chief-chancellor, and from an
upper porch he returned quickening with the intelligence that there
was not a cloud in the sky, a state of the heavens known to no
coronation since Babylon was ruled by Assyrian viceroys. The lord
chief-chancellor and Cassyrus themselves brought forth the crown--a
beautiful crown, shining like dust-in-the-sun--and Cassyrus, in a
voice that trumpeted, rehearsed its history: how it had been made of
jewels brought from the coffers of Amasis and Apries, when King
Nebuchadnezzar wrested Phoenicia from Egypt, and, too, of all manner
of precious stones sent by Queen Atossa, wife of Darius, when the
Crotoniat Democedes, with two triremes and a trading vessel, visited
Yaque before they went to survey Hellenic shores, with what
disastrous result. And Olivia, standing in the queen's gown,
listened without hearing one word, and turned to have her veil
lifted by Antoinette and the daughter of a peer of Yaque; and she
knelt before the people while the lord chief-chancellor set the
crown on her bright hair. It was a picture that thrilled the lord
chief-chancellor himself--who was a worshiper of beauty, and a man
given to angling in the lagoon and making metric translations of the
inscriptions.

Then it was in the room as if a faint flame had been breathed upon
and had upleaped in a thousand ways of expectancy, and as if a
secret sign had been set in the lift and dip of the music--the music
that was so like the great chamber with its lift and dip of carven
line. The thrill with which one knows the glad news of an unopened
letter was upon them all, and they heard that swift breath of an
event that stirs before its coming. When Olivia's women fell back
from the dais with wonder and murmur, the murmur was caught up in
the great hall, and ran from tier to tier as amazement, as
incredulity, and as thanksgiving.

For there, beside the beetling throne, was standing a man, slenderly
built, with a youthful, sensitive face and critically-drooping lids,
and upon them all his eyes were turned in faint amusement warmed by
an idle approbation.

"Perfect--perfect. Quite perfect," he was saying below his breath.

Olivia turned. The next moment she stood with outstretched arms
before her father; and King Otho, in his long, straight robe,
encrusted with purple amethysts, bent with exquisite courtesy above
his daugh