y
banners wave!'" Lucy's impatient shrug silenced her, but she was
preoccupied and excited throughout the day. Miss Vance watched her
curiously. Could it be that she had heard of the prince's plan of
marrying her to his cousin, and that she was building these air castles
for herself?

A day or two sufficed to make Miss Vance's cheery apartments the
rendezvous of troops of Americans of all kinds: from the rich lounger,
bored by the sight of pictures, which he did not understand, and courts
which he could not enter, to the half-starved, eager-eyed art students,
who smoked, and drank beer, and chattered in gutturals, hoping to pass
for Germans.

There were plenty of idle young New Yorkers and Bostonians too,
hovering round Lucy and Jean, overweighted by their faultless London
coats and trousers and fluent French. But they deceived nobody; they
all had that nimble brain, and that unconscious swagger of importance
and success which stamps the American in every country. Prince Hugo,
in his old brown suit, came and went quietly among them.

"The genuine article!" Jean declared loudly. "There is something royal
in his hospitality! He lays all Munich at Lucy's feet, as if it were
his own estate, and the museums and palaces were the furniture of his
house. That homely simplicity of his is tremendously fine, if she
could understand it!"

The homely genuineness had its effect even upon Lucy. The carriage
which he brought to drive them to Isar-anen was scaly with age, but the
crest upon it was the noblest in Bavaria; in the cabinet of portraits
of ancient beauties in the royal palace he showed her indifferently two
or three of his aunts and grandmothers, and in the historical picture
of the anointing of the great Charlemagne, one of his ancestors, stout
and good-humored as Hugo himself, supported the emperor.

"The pudgy little man," said Jean one day, "somehow belongs to the old
world of knights and crusaders--Sintram and his companions. He will
make it all real to Lucy when she marries him. He is like Ali Baba,
standing at the shut door of the cave full of jewels and treasures with
the key in his hand."

"Those Arabian Night stories are simply silly," said Lucy severely. "I
am astonished that any woman in this age of the world should read that
kind of trash."

"But the prince's cave?" persisted Jean. "When are we to look into it?
I want to be sure of the treasures inside. When are we to go to his
palace?