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 ing the whole night in defying their charms. For he was, with all his stern principles and his experience of two marriages—by no means happy ones—only thirty years of age. He was not yet the grave Cato that he considered himself.

Coming out of the dining-hall, the Emperor stood in the midst of a row of pillars supporting a beautiful arch of the ball-room; and while the whole company, with Count Felsenburk and Princess Wildenšwert at the head, were gayly circling in a polonaise, he was talking with some fat, curly-wigged councilman, who, under the sovereign’s perplexing questions, was sweating even more than his predecessors. Wishing to penetrate more deeply into the subject he had just taken for discussion, and being annoyed by the whirling figures before him, the Emperor, in the course of the discussion, had moved back into an alcove which he thought was entirely vacant.

Not far away in the arch the Emperor saw a lady standing alone and leaning against one of the pillars wreathed with flowers. It was