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The Princess Aline by Richard Harding Davis
page 42 of 99 (42%)
with silver buttons. In one place there was a wedding
procession waiting for the train to pass, with the friends of
the bride and groom in their best clothes, the women with
silver breastplates, and boots to their knees. It seemed
hardly possible that only two days before they had seen
another wedding party in the Champs Elysees, where the men
wore evening dress, and the women were bareheaded and with
long trains. In forty-eight hours they had passed through
republics, principalities, empires, and kingdoms, and from
spring to winter. It was like walking rapidly over a painted
panorama of Europe.

On the second evening Carlton went off into the smoking-car
alone. The Duke of Hohenwald and two of his friends had
finished a late supper, and were seated in the apartment
adjoining it. The Duke was a young man with a heavy beard and
eyeglasses. He was looking over an illustrated catalogue of
the Salon, and as Carlton dropped on the sofa opposite the
Duke raised his head and looked at him curiously, and then
turned over several pages of the catalogue and studied one of
them, and then back at Carlton, as though he were comparing
him with something on the page before him. Carlton was
looking out at the night, but he could follow what was going
forward, as it was reflected in the glass of the car window.
He saw the Duke hand the catalogue to one of the equerries,
who raised his eyebrows and nodded his head in assent.
Carlton wondered what this might mean, until he remembered
that there was a portrait of himself by a French artist in the
Salon, and concluded it had been reproduced in the catalogue.
He could think of nothing else which would explain the
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