give orders to the generals under me, of whom I was the chief, I had the
right to put thereon the royal imprint of Don Carlos. I was given all
the papers incident to the granting of orders and grades in the army,
and I had the seal of the King--the seal of the Royal King."

But, unfortunately for the prisoner, the seals upon the papers turned
out to be the legitimate arms of Spain and not those of Don Carlos, and
as a finale he ingenuously identified the seal of the Mayor of Madrid as
that of his "Royal King."

Next came a selection of letters of nobility, sealed and signed in the
name of Pope Leo the Thirteenth. These, he asserted, must have been
placed there by his enemies. "I am a soldier and a general of honor, and
I never did any such trafficking," he cried grandly, when charged with
selling bogus patents of nobility.

He explained some of his correspondence with the Lapierres and his
famous bill for twelve thousand dollars by saying that when he found out
that the inheritance Tessier did not exist he had conceived the idea of
making a novel of the story--a "fantastic history"--to be published "in
four languages simultaneously," and asserted solemnly that he had
intended printing the whole sixteen feet of bill as part of the romance.

Then, to the undisguised horror of the unfortunate General, at a summons
from the prosecutor an elderly French woman arose in the audience and
came to the bar. The General turned first pale, then purple. He hotly
denied that he had married this lady in France twenty-three years ago.

"Name of a name! He had known her! Yes--certainly! But she was no wife
of his--she had been only his servant. The other lady--the
Hibernian--was his only wife." But the chickens had begun to come home
to roost. The pointed mustaches drooped with an unmistakable look of
dejection, and as he marched back to his seat his shoulders no longer
had the air of military distinction that one would expect in a general
of a "Royal King." His head sank on his chest as his deserted wife took
the stand against him--the wife whom, he had imagined, he would never
see again.

Any one could have seen that Elizabeth de Moreno was a good woman. Her
father's name, she said, was Nichaud, and she had first met the prisoner
twenty-three years ago in the village of Dalk, in the Department of the
Tarne, where, in 1883, he had been convicted and sentenced for stealing
bed linen from the Hotel Kassam. She had remained faithful