wncast eyes.
The young emperor, Othomar XII., was at Altara, leading the solemn
procession. The empress-mother was at the Crown Palace, with the young
Empress Valerie.... Over their glamour, still shining, shone new
glamours, in life which had continued, which was continuing still....

The two empresses sat side by side. Valerie held Elizabeth gently in her
arms; at regular intervals the guns boomed from the fort, through the
palace...

Then Elizabeth drew herself up painfully from her daughter-in-law's arms
and spoke in low, oracular tones:

"If it's a son ... it will be a Duke of Xara.... He would so much have
liked to see a Count of Lycilia...."

The guns boomed; the two empresses, in deep mourning, wept and sobbed.
And now for the first time after a long interval--as there had also been
a long interval at Berengar's death--Elizabeth realized all her loss,
her sorrow, her misery, her despair; and she felt that that emperor, to
whom, as a very young princess, now four-and-twenty years ago, she had
been given in marriage, without love, she had come to love in this
quarter of a century of their life in common on his high pinnacle of
sovereignty....

That evening Othomar returned and, alone with his wife, with his mother,
he sobbed with them, the young emperor, whom no one had seen weeping in
the cathedral at Altara. For the Empress Elizabeth had repeated yet once
more:

"If it's a son ... it will be a Duke of Xara...."

And then the Emperor of Liparia had lost his self-restraint. In one
lightning-flash, one zig-zag of terror, he saw again his life as
crown-prince, he thought of his unborn son. What would become of this
child of fate? Would it be a repetition of himself, of his hesitation,
his melancholy and his despair?

And then with irrepressible sobs, suddenly overwhelmed by the menace of
the future, he sobbed out his grief for his father who had been and his
son who was to be! He sobbed, with his head in the arms of his young
empress, who, suddenly realizing that she must comfort him, had grown
calm and looked calmly down upon him, taking their life of majesty upon
her shoulders as though it were an oppressive, heavy mantle of purple
and ermine and nothing more, taking it up so valiantly because there
flowed in her veins as in his one single drop of sacred golden blood,
common to all of their order, their might upon earth and their right
before God....

6

"To HER IMPERIAL AND ROYAL HIGHNESS