down the path, and it turned out to be Tillie, the diet cook.

She slammed the door behind her and threw the Finleyville evening paper
at me.

"There!" she said, "I've won a cake of toilet soap from Bath-house Mike.
The emperor's consented."

"Nonsense!" I snapped, and snatched the paper. Tillie was right; the
emperor HAD! I sat down and read it through, and there was Miss Patty's
picture in an oval and the prince's in another, with a turned-up
mustache and his hand on the handle of his sword, and between them both
was the Austrian emperor. Tillie came and looked over my shoulder.

"I'm not keen on the mustache," she said, "but the sword's
beautiful--and, oh, Minnie, isn't he aristocratic? Look at his nose!"

But I'm not one to make up my mind in a hurry, and I'd heard enough talk
about foreign marriages in the years I'd been dipping out mineral water
to make me a skeptic, so to speak.

"I'm not so sure," I said slowly. "You can't tell anything by that kind
of a picture. If he was even standing beside a chair I could get a line
on him. He may be only four feet high."

"Then Miss Jennings wouldn't love him," declared Tillie. "How do you
reckon he makes his mustache point up like that?"

"What's love got to do with it?" I demanded. "Don't be a fool, Tillie.
It takes more than two people's pictures in a newspaper with a red heart