The Princess Aline by Richard Harding Davis
page 42 of 99 (42%)
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 |
|