habit of exaggeration, she still could tell a pretty tale, and there had been much to recount during Fessenden’s sojourn in South America and after his return. To a princess living the most conventional and restricted of earthly lives he represented all that the world, beyond palace walls, held of romance, of freedom, of the grand free play of personality. As she grew older she forbade her fancy to lead him into the backwaters of sentiment, that being a part of the necessary discipline of self; but there had been times when the effort had exhausted her. Two thoughts had flashed through her mind as she realized that she stood face to face with him at last: the one came from depths she did not pause to analyze--“If I had suddenly heard that he was dead, instead of meeting him like this, I should have been appalled by a sense of personal loss.” The other thought flew straight from superstition and made her for the moment the sister of the peasant-women about her--“This colored frock! I might have known it would bring me bad luck!” In a moment she had angrily dismissed both suggestions, but she endeavored to nurse a general resentment. She had been taken abominable advantage of. He had known who she was and dared to treat her like any ordinary girl masquerading. That royalty, or aristocracy for that matter, moves on unselfconscious heights is one of the fictions of fiction. The aristocracies of Europe may not, in the manner of the American, carry their ancestors like a bunch of chips on their shoulder, but like royalty, they are “simple and unaffected” only so long as they are not expected to be humble and are not approached by the wrong sort of people. The intense dramatic moments of William of Germany might alone convince the unthinking of royalty’s sense of its own value. Ranata was not dramatic, or at all events had wanted opportunity; but had she inherited the simplicity of her mother, which assuredly she had not, she would have found it a difficult task to forget that she was the daughter of an emperor. But she had experienced no such inclination. She might sigh for liberty, and in erratic moments wish she had been born an American, but to her composition had gone the haughtiest particles of Europe. She was not only the last born of an ancient line of kings who had exercised despotic rule over vast possessions, but who had built about themselves a triple golden wall of ceremony. No court had ever been so uncomplaisant, no royal favor so difficult to gain; to-day no house in Europe was so tenacious of its ancient formalities. Every act of Ranata’s life to which the least importance could be attached had been the combined result of her active consciousness that she was the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, and of instinctive ancestral tribute.