It is the Emperor," she said, with an odd ring in her voice which none
had ever heard before. Then she stood looking after the carriage.

Her father, who was at her elbow--tall, white-haired, with an
aquiline, inscrutable face--stood in a like attitude, looking down the
Pfaffengasse. His hand was raised before his face with outspread fingers
which seemed rigid in that gesture, as if lifted hastily to screen his
face and hide it.

"Did he see me?" he asked in a low voice which only Desiree heard.

She glanced at him, and her eyes, which were clear as a cloudless sky,
were suddenly shadowed by a suspicion quick and poignant.

"He seemed to see everything, but he only looked at Charles," she
answered. For a moment they all stood in the sunshine looking towards
the Langenmarkt where the tower of the Rathhaus rose above the high
roofs. The dust raised by the horses' feet and the carriage wheels
slowly settled on their bridal clothes.

It was Desiree who at length made a movement to continue their way
towards her father's house.

"Well," she said with a slight laugh, "he was not bidden to my wedding,
but he has come all the same."

Others laughed as they followed her. For a bride at the church-door, or
a judge on the bench, or a criminal on the scaffold-steps, need make but
a very small joke to cause merriment. Laughter is often nothing but the
froth of tears.

There were faces suddenly bleached in the little group of
wedding-guests, and none were whiter than the handsome features of
Mathilde Sebastian, Desiree's elder sister, who looked angry, had
frowned at the children, and seemed to find this simple wedding too
bourgeois for her taste. She carried her head with an air that told the
world not to expect that she should ever be content to marry in such
a humble style, and walk from the church in satin slippers like any
daughter of a burgher.

This, at all events, was what old Koch the locksmith must have read in
her beautiful, discontented face.

"Ah! ah!" he muttered to the bolts as he shot them. "But it is not the
lightest hearts that quit the church in a carriage."

So simple were the arrangements that bride and bridegroom and
wedding-guests had to wait in the street while the servant unlocked
the front door of No. 36 with a great key hurriedly extracted from her
apron-pocket.

There was no unusual stir in the street. The windows of one or two of
the houses had been decorated with flowers. These were the ho