bait him--how can she resist baiting him? Sally Blake is
human."

"Cousin Philippe, this is not our dauphin? Our dauphin is dead! Both my
father and you told me he died in the Temple prison nearly two weeks
ago!"

The Marquis de Ferrier replaced the boy's stockings reverently, and
rose, backing away from him.

"There is your king, Eagle," the old courtier announced to his child.
"Louis XVII, the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, survives in this
wreck. How he escaped from prison we do not know. Why he is here
unrecognized in England, where his claim to the throne was duly
acknowledged on the death of his father, we do not know. But we who have
often seen the royal child cannot fail to identify him; brutalized as he
is by the past horrible year of his life."

The boy stood unwinking before his three expatriated subjects. Two of
them noted the traits of his house, even to his ears, which were full at
top, and without any indentation at the bottom where they met the sweep
of the jaw.

The dauphin of France had been the most tortured victim of his country's
Revolution. By a jailer who cut his eyebrow open with a blow, and
knocked him down on the slightest pretext, the child had been forced to
drown memory in fiery liquor, month after month. During six worse
months, which might have been bettered by even such a jailer, hid from
the light in an airless dungeon, covered with rags which were never
changed, and with filth and vermin which daily accumulated, having his
food passed to him through a slit in the door, hearing no human voice,
seeing no human face, his joints swelling with poisoned blood, he had
died in everything except physical vitality, and was taken out at last
merely a breathing corpse. Then it was proclaimed that this corpse had
ceased to breathe. The heir of a long line of kings was coffined and
buried.

While the elder De Ferrier shed nervous tears, the younger looked on
with eyes which had seen the drollery of the French Revolution.

"I wish I knew the man who has played this clever trick, and whether
honest men or the rabble are behind it."

"Let us find him and embrace him!"

"_I_ would rather embrace his prospects when the house of Bourbon comes
again to the throne of France. Who is that fellow at the gate? He looks
as if he had some business here."

The man came on among the tombstones, showing a full presence and
prosperous air, suggesting good vintages, such as were never set out in