Page:T.M. Royal Highness.djvu/216

200 with her elbow. She was wearing a long coat of shiny black fox, and a toque of the same fur on her dark foreign-looking hair. She was obviously coming from "Delphine-nort" and hurrying towards the University. She reached the main guard-house at the moment at which the relief guard marched up the gutter, over against the guard on duty, which standing at attention in two ranks occupied the pavement. She was absolutely compelled to go round, outside the band and the crowd of spectators—indeed, if she wished to avoid the open square with its tram-lines, to make a fairly wide detour on the footpath running round it—or to wait for the end of the military ceremony.

She showed no intention of doing either. She made as if to walk along the pavement in front of the Schloss right down between the two ranks of soldiers. The sergeant with the harsh voice stepped forward quickly. "Not this way!" he cried and held the butt of his rifle in front of her. "Not this way! Right about! Wait!"

But Miss Spoelmann fired up. "What d'you mean?" she cried. "I'm in a hurry!"

But her words were not so impressive as the expression of honest, passionate, irresistible anger with which they were uttered. How slight and lonely she was! The fair-haired soldiers round her towered head and shoulders above her. Her face was as pale as wax at this moment, her black eyebrows were knitted in a hard and expressive wrinkle, her nostrils distended, and her eyes, black with excitement and wide-opened, spoke so expressive and bewitching a language that no protest seemed possible.

"What d'you mean?" she cried. "I'm in a hurry!" And as she said it she pushed the rifle-butt, and the stupefied sergeant with it, aside, and walked down between the lines, went straight on her way, turned to the left into Universitätsstrasse and vanished.