The princess slipped away from her nursemaid, who would have wished to make her present herself formally. But even a royal nursemaid's jurisdictions end at the ballroom door. The princess found a chair standing next to a curtain and shadowed by the column at its back, and set herself silently down.

When the princess's return was noticed, and the dancing started again, one or two young men approached the princess hopefully. But she disliked her dancing lessons, and disliked being touched and held so by strangers, and she drew back in her chair and shook her head emphatically at her would-be partners. They went away, and after a little time no more came. She curled up on her gilt chair and rested her head softly on one of its velvet arms, and watched her mother and father dancing, their footsteps as light and graceful as the dainty steps of the royal deer.

TWO

IT WAS TWO YEARS LATER THAT THE QUEEN FELL ILL, AND NO

doctor could help her; and at first no one thought it was serious. Indeed, some went so far as to hint that nothing at all was wrong; that the queen merely needed taking out of herself-or perhaps putting back into herself, for she gave of her presence and her beauty too freely, and was wearied by the adoration of her people. At first it was only that she rose late and retired early; but the weeks passed, and she rose later and later, and was seen outside her rooms less and less; and then the news came that she no longer left her bed, and then that she could not leave her bed.

And then it was said that she was dying.

The doctors shook their heads, and murmured long words to each other. The people wept, and prayed to their gods, and told themselves and each other many stories, till the real story sounded no truer than the rest. The story that contained the most truth, although it was not the story that was listened to the most often, was that the queen might not die, except that her illness, the strange invisible illness with no name, had robbed her of the tiniest fraction of her beauty.