e adjacent cottage which Mr. Sarrasin had named Camelot, life flowed
on in a tranquil current. The Dictator often came up; whatever the
claims, the demands upon him, he managed to dine one day in every week
with Miss Ericson. Not the same day in every week indeed; the Dictator's
life was inevitably too irregular for that; but always one day,
whichever day he could snatch from the imperious pressure of the growing
plans for his restoration, from the society which still regarded him as
the most royal of royal lions, and, above all, from the society of the
Langleys. However, it did not matter. One day was so like another up in
Hampstead, that it really made no difference whether any particular
event took place upon a Monday, a Tuesday, or a Wednesday; and Miss
Ericson was so happy in seeing so much of her nephew after so long and
blank an absence, that it would never have occurred to her to complain,
if indeed complaining ever found much of a place in her gentle nature.

Whenever the Dictator came now, Mr. Sarrasin was always on hand, and
always eager to converse with the wonderful nephew who had come back to
London like an exiled king. To Mr. Sarrasin the event had a threefold
interest. In the first place, the Dictator was the nephew of Miss
Ericson. Had he been the most commonplace fellow that had ever set one
foot before the other, there would have been something attractive about
him to Sarrasin because of his kinship with his gentle neighbour. In the
second place, he knew now that his brother, the brother whom he adored,
had declared himself on the Dictator's side, and had joined the
Dictator's party. In the third place, if no associations of friendship
or kinship had linked him in any way with the fortunes of the Dictator,
the mere fact of his eventful rule, of his stormy fortunes, of the rise
and fall of such a stranger in such a strange land, would have fired all
that was romantic, all that was adventurous, in the nature of the quiet,
stay-at-home gentleman, and made him as eager a follower of the
Dictator's career as if Ericson had been Jack with the Eleven Brothers,
or the Boy who Could not Shiver. So Mr. Sarrasin spent the better part
of six days in the week conversing with Miss Ericson about the Dictator;
and on the day when Ericson came to Hampstead, Sarrasin was sure, sooner
or later, to put in an appearance at Blarulf's Garth, and to beam in
delighted approbation upon the exile of Gloria.

One day Mr. Sarrasi