Nikko would have been quite happy if she had not been so worried about her bare feet. Sooner or later they would be discovered and oh, what would the Emperor think of her then? Just now he took her hand and said to her:
“My dear, you must tell me what you would like for a wedding gift!” And Nikko almost cried out: “Shoes, your Majesty, shoes!” but she did not want to give herself away, so she replied,
“Well, I do not know which I would rather have, a bright brocaded shawl or a new pair of slippers!”
“You shall have both,” declared the Emperor, and ordered a maiden to fetch them. Nikko donned the shawl and slipped on the little shoes but they were so small that they hurt her feet dreadfully.
“Ah well,” she said to herself, biting back tears of pain. “I shall have to get used to some discomforts now that I am to be an Empress!”
She had been Empress for about a week, when her husband the Emperor fell very ill. It really was indigestion after the wedding-feast, but of course the doctors wanted to make it something more dignified, so they said:
“He must have been bitten by a poisonous insect!”
“Yes, and I know who it was,” said Lu Tsing to her attendants. “It was the golden Spider who sat on Nikko’s breast when she came! Everybody thought it was a pin, but it really was a Spider, for I saw him creep away!” and the attendants went about the palace telling everybody how Nikko had worn a live Spider for a pin.
Nikko was very anxious about her husband. He lay on a couch in the parlor because he was too ill to sit on his throne, and twenty doctors stood around and told him that a poisonous insect must have bitten him. Just then Lu Tsing came in, with a tea-cup in her hand.
“Behold what the maid found in his Majesty’s bed when she turned the mattress!” she cried, And showed them the golden Spider, who sat in the tea-cup and looked at them with great surprise.
“Why, it is the Spider that Nikko wore when she came,” said the Emperor. “We all thought it was a pin. And she said she had lost it. Nikko, you were fibbing!”
[Illustration: “Friends, Courtiers, Chinamen! I have changed my mind”]
“And then she put the Spider into your Majesty’s bed!” cried all the people. “She is a wicked woman!”
