lf a dozen years my senior, as
a mother would whimsically decorate her child, Marie-Therese took the
half circlet of gems from the casket, reached up, and set it on my head.

For an instant I was crowned in Mittau, with my mother's tiara.

I saw the king's features turn to granite, and a dark red stain show on
his jaws like coloring on stone. The most benevolent men, and by all his
traits he was one of the most benevolent, have their pitiless moments.
He must have been prepared to combat a pretender before I entered the
room. But outraged majesty would now take its full vengeance on me for
the unconsidered act of the child he loved.

"First two peasants, Hervagault and Bruneau, neither of whom had the
audacity to steal into the confidence of the tenderest princess in
Europe with the tokens she must recognize, or to penetrate into the
presence," spoke the king: "and now an escaped convict from Ste.
Pelagie, a dandy from the Empire!"

I was only twenty, and he stung me.

"Your royal highness," I said, speaking as I believed within my rights,
"my sister tries to put a good front on my intrusion into Mittau."

I took the coronet from my head and gave it again to the hand which had
crowned me. Marie-Therese let it fall, and it rocked near the feet of
the king.

"Your sister, monsieur! What right have you to call Madame d'Angouleme
your sister!"

"The same right, monsieur, that you have to call her your niece."

The features of the princess became pinched and sharpened under the
softness of her fair hair.

"Sire, if this is not my brother, who is he?"

Louis XVIII may have been tender to her every other moment of his life,
but he was hard then, and looked beyond her toward the door, making a
sign with his hand.

That strange sympathy which works in me for my opponent, put his
outraged dignity before me rather than my own wrong. Deeper, more
sickening than death, the first faintness of self-distrust came over me.
What if my half-memories were unfounded hallucinations? What if my
friend Louis Philippe had made a tool of me, to annoy this older Bourbon
branch that detested him? What if Bellenger's recognition, and the
Marquis du Plessy's, and Marie-Therese's, went for nothing? What if some
other, and not this angry man, had sent the money to America--

The door opened again. We turned our heads, and I grew hot at the
cruelty which put that idiot before my sister's eyes. He ran on all
fours, his gaunt wrists expos