The members of the High Council rustled in their colour and white, and flashed their golden stars; the Golden Guards (save the apostate few who were that day sentenced to be set adrift) were filling the stairway like a bank of buttercups; and Olivia’s women, led by Antoinette in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated, were entering by an opposite door.  In the raised seats near the High Council, Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham leaned to wave a sustaining greeting.  Until that high moment Mrs. Medora Hastings had been by no means certain that Olivia would appear at all, though she openly nourished the hope that “everything would go off smoothly.”  ("I don’t care much for foreigners and never have,” she confided to Mr. Frothingham, “still, I was thinking while I was at breakfast, after all, to the prince we are the foreigners.  There is something in that, don’t you think?  And then the dear prince—­he is so very metaphysical!”)

Upon the beetling throne Olivia took her place, and her women sank about her like tiers of sunset clouds.  She was so little and so beautiful and so unconsciously appealing that when Prince Tabnit and Cassyrus and the rest of the court entered, it is doubtful if an eye left Olivia, to homage them.  But Prince Tabnit was the last to note that, for he saw only Olivia; and the world—­the world was an intaglio of his own designing.

With due magnificence the preliminary ceremonies of the coronation proceeded—­musty necessities, like oaths and historical truths, being mingled with the most delicate observances, such as the naming of the former princesses of the island, from Adija, daughter of King Abibaal, to Olivia, daughter of King Otho; and such as counting the clouds for the misfortunes of the regime.  This last duty fell to the office of the lord chief-chancellor, and from an upper porch he returned quickening with the intelligence that there was not a cloud in the sky, a state of the heavens known to no coronation since Babylon was ruled by Assyrian viceroys.  The lord chief-chancellor and Cassyrus themselves brought forth the crown—­a beautiful crown, shining like dust-in-the-sun—­and Cassyrus, in a voice that trumpeted, rehearsed its history:  how it had been made of jewels brought from the coffers of Amasis and Apries, when King Nebuchadnezzar wrested Phoenicia from Egypt, and, too, of all manner of precious stones sent by Queen Atossa, wife of Darius, when the Crotoniat Democedes, with two triremes and a trading vessel, visited Yaque before they went to survey Hellenic shores, with what disastrous result.  And Olivia, standing in the queen’s gown, listened without hearing one word, and turned to have her veil lifted by Antoinette and the daughter of a peer of Yaque; and she knelt before the people while the lord chief-chancellor set the crown on her bright hair.  It was a picture that thrilled the lord chief-chancellor himself—­who was a worshiper of beauty, and a man given to angling in the lagoon and making metric translations of the inscriptions.