sing for discussion. I am a man of
benevolent disposition, Bellenger."

"Your royal highness--"

"Stop! I have been a revolutionist, like my poor father, whose memory
you were about to touch--and I forbid it. But I am a man whose will it
is to do good. It is impossible I should search you out in America to
harm my royal cousin. Now I want to know the truth about him."

Madame de Ferrier had forgotten her breath. We both stood fastened on
that scene in another world, guiltless of eavesdropping.

The potter shifted his eyes from side to side, seeming to follow the
burr of his vessel upon the wheel.

"I find you with a creature I cannot recognize as my royal cousin. If
this is he, sunk far lower than when he left France in your charge, why
are two-thirds of his pension sent out from New York to another person,
while you receive for his maintenance only one-third?"

The potter bounded from his wheel, letting the vessel spin off to
destruction, and danced, stretching his long mustaches abroad in both
hands as the ancients must have rent their clothes. He cried that he had
been cheated, stripped, starved.

"I thought they were straitened in Monsieur's court," he raged, "and
they have been maintaining a false dauphin!"

"As I said, Bellenger," remarked his superior, "you are either a fool or
the greatest rascal I ever saw."

He looked at Bellenger attentively.

"Yet why should you want to mix clues--and be rewarded with evident
misery? And how could you lose him out of your hand and remain
unconscious of it? He was sent to the ends of the earth for safety--poor
shattered child!--and if he is safe elsewhere, why should you be
pensioned to maintain another child? They say that a Bourbon never
learns anything; but I protest that a Bourbon knows well what he does
know. I feel sure my uncle intends no harm to the disabled heir. Who is
guilty of this double dealing? I confess I don't understand it."

Now whether by our long and silent stare we drew his regard, or chance
cast his eye upward, the potter that instant saw us standing in the
cloud above him. He dropped by his motionless wheel, all turned to clay
himself. The eyeballs stuck from his face. He opened his mouth and
screeched as if he had been started and could not leave off--

"The king!--the king!--the king!--the king!"

IX

The fool's outcry startled me less than Madame de Ferrier. She fell
against me and sank downward, so that I was obliged to hol