'That will do,' she said. 'Bid my carriage follow me to the palace.
In half an hour it should be there in waiting.'
The night was beginning to fall and the shops to shine with lamps
along the tree-beshadowed thorough-fares of Otto's capital, when the
Countess started on her high emprise. She was jocund at heart;
pleasure and interest had winged her beauty, and she knew it. She
paused before the glowing jeweller's; she remarked and praised a
costume in the milliner's window; and when she reached the lime-tree
walk, with its high, umbrageous arches and stir of passers-by in the
dim alleys, she took her place upon a bench and began to dally with
the pleasures of the hour. It was cold, but she did not feel it,
being warm within; her thoughts, in that dark corner, shone like the
gold and rubies at the jewellers; her ears, which heard the brushing
of so many footfalls, transposed it into music.
What was she to do? She held the paper by which all depended. Otto
and Gondremark and Ratafia, and the state itself, hung light in her
balances, as light as dust; her little finger laid in either scale
would set all flying: and she hugged herself upon her huge
preponderance, and then laughed aloud to think how giddily it might
be used. The vertigo of omnipotence, the disease of Caesars, shook
her reason. 'O the mad world!' she thought, and laughed aloud in
exultation.
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