“Is it always like this here?” she asked, gazing around her. “Do you always sit thus in a chair, dressed grandly and quite silent?” The smile deepened on the King’s face; the Queen, perforce moved at last from her inertia, half rose with an air of amazement and indignation, and Von Glauben barely saved himself from laughing outright. “You,” continued Gloria, fixing her bright glance on the King; “You have seen me before! You have spoken to me. Then why do you pretend not to know me now? Is that Court manners? If so, they are not good or kind!” The King relaxed his formal attitude, and addressed his Consort in a low tone. “It is no use dealing with this girl in the conventional way,” he said; “She is a mere child at heart, simple and uneducated;--we must treat her as such. Perhaps you will speak to her first?” “No, Sir, I much prefer that you should do so,” she replied. “When I have heard her answers to you, it will be perhaps my turn!” Thereupon the King advanced a step or two, and Gloria regarded him steadfastly. Meeting the pure light of those lovely eyes, he lost something of his ordinary self-possession,--he was conscious of a certain sense of embarrassment and foolishness;--his very uniform, ablaze with gold and jewelled orders, seemed a clown’s costume compared with the classic simplicity of Gloria’s homespun garb, which might have fitly clothed a Greek goddess. Sensible of his nervous irritation, he however overcame it by an effort, and summoning all his dignity, he ‘graciously,’ as the newspaper parasites put it, extended his hand. Gloria smiled archly. “I kissed your hand the other day when you were cross!” she said; “You would like it kissed again? There!” And with easy grace of gesture she pressed her lips lightly upon it. It would have needed something stronger than mere flesh and blood to resist the natural playfulness and charm of her action, combined with her unparalleled beauty, and the King, who was daily and hourly proving for himself the power and intensity of that Spirit of Man which makes clamour for higher things than Man’s conventionalities, became for the moment as helplessly overwhelmed and defeated by a woman’s smile, a woman’s eyes, as any hero of old times, whose conquests have been reported to us in history as achieved for the sake of love and beauty. But he was compelled to disguise his thoughts, and to maintain an outward expression of formality, particularly in the presence of his Queen-Consort,--and he withdrew the hand that bore her soft kiss upon it with a well-simulated air of chill tolerance. Then he spoke gravely, in measured precise accents.