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Rh wisps across her forehead, and a long hanging chain of the same stones was wound two or three times round her brown throat. Small and child-like, yet strangely earnest and sensible-looking, with her pale face and big, strangely speaking eyes, she had stood in her place of honour by the side of Countess Löwenjoul, who had been dressed in brown as usual, though this time in satin. When the cortege reached her, she had, with a kind of coy pertness, made a suggestion of a curtsey, without completing it; but when Prince Klaus Heinrich, with the yellow ribbon and the flat chain of the Family Order "For Constancy" over his tunic, the silver star of the Grimmburg Griffin on his chest, and his anaemic cousin on his arm whose conversation was limited to "Yes," passed by her directly after the Grand Duke, she had smiled with closed lips and nodded to him like a comrade—which sent something like a quiver through the company.

Then, after the diplomats had been received by the Grand Ducal party, the presentations had begun—begun with Imma Spoelmann, although there had been two Countess Hundskeels and one Baroness von Schulenburg-Tressen among the debutantes. With an ingratiating smile, which showed his false teeth, Herr von Bühl had presented Spoelmann's daughter to his master. And Albrecht, sucking his lower lip against his upper, had looked down on her coy semi-curtsey, from which she had raised herself to scrutinize with her speaking eyes the suffering Hussar Colonel in his silent pride. The Grand Duke had addressed several questions to her, an exception to an otherwise strict rule; he had asked her how her father was, what effect the Ditlinde Spa had, and how she liked on the whole being with us—questions which she had answered in her broken voice with a pout and a wag of her dark head. Then, after a pause, a pause perhaps of internal struggle, Albrecht had expressed his pleasure at seeing her