They watched for him from the windows of the reading-room, while the crowd outside stood six deep on the three sides of the square before the hotel, and the two plain public carriages which brought the King and his suite drew tamely up at the portal, where the proprietor and some civic dignitaries received him.

His moderated approach, so little like that of royalty on the stage, to which Americans are used, allowed Mrs.March to make sure of the pale, slight, insignificant, amiable-looking youth in spectacles as the sovereign she was ambuscading.

Then no appeal to her principles could keep her from peeping through the reading-room door into the rotunda, where the King graciously but speedily dismissed the civic gentlemen and the proprietor, and vanished into the elevator.

She was destined to see him so often afterwards that she scarcely took the trouble to time her dining and supping by that of the simple potentate, who had his meals in one of the public rooms, with three gentlemen of his suite, in sack-coats like himself, after the informal manner of the place.
Still another potentate, who happened that summer to be sojourning abroad, in the interval of a successful rebellion, was at the opera one night with some of his faithful followers.

Burnamy had offered Mrs.
March, who supposed that he merely wanted her and her husband with him, places in a box; but after she eagerly accepted, it seemed that he wished her to advise him whether it would do to ask Miss Triscoe and her father to join them.
"Why not ?" she returned, with an arching of the eyebrows.
"Why," he said, "perhaps I had better make a clean breast of it." "Perhaps you had," she said, and they both laughed, though he laughed with a knot between his eyes.
"The fact is, you know, this isn't my treat, exactly.