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.
Then it was in the room as if a faint flame had been breathed upon and had upleaped in a thousand ways of expectancy, and as if a secret sign had been set in the lift and dip of the music--the music that was so like the great chamber with its lift and dip of carven line.

The thrill with which one knows the glad news of an unopened letter was upon them all, and they heard that swift breath of an event that stirs before its coming.