you all I know," said the Archduchess impatiently. "One
moment he was there. Hedwig and he were making gestures, and I reproved
him. The next he was gone. Hedwig saw him get up and go out. She
thought--"

"Send for Hedwig."

"She has retired. She was devoted to him, and--"

"Send for her," said the King shortly.

The Archduchess Annunciata went out. The old King lay back, and
his eyes, weary with many years of ruling, of disappointments and
bitterness, roved the room. They came to rest at last on the photograph
of a young man, which stood on his bedside, table.

He was a very young man, in a uniform. He was boyish, and smiling. There
was a dog beside him, and its head was on his knee. Wherever one stood
in the room, the eyes of the photograph gazed at one. The King knew
this, and because he was quite old, and because there were few people to
whom a king dares to speak his inmost thoughts, he frequently spoke to
the photograph.

The older he grew, the more he felt, sometimes, as though it knew what
he said. He had begun to think that death, after all, is not the end,
but only the beginning of things. This rather worried him, too, at
times. What he wanted was to lay things down, not to take them up.

"If they've got him," he said to the picture, "it is out of my hands,
and into yours, my boy."

Much of his life had been spent in waiting, in waiting for a son, in
waiting for that son to grow to be a man, in waiting while that son in
his turn loved and married and begot a man-child, in waiting, when that
son had died a violent death, for the time when his tired hands could
relinquish the scepter to his grandchild.

He folded his old hands and waited. From across the corridor came the
low tones of the Council. A silent group of his gentlemen stood in the
vestibule outside the door. The King lay on his bed and waited.

Quite suddenly the door opened. The old man turned his head. Just inside
stood a very dirty small boy.

The Crown Prince Ferdinand William Otto was most terribly frightened.
Everything was at sixes and sevens. Miss Braithwaite had been crying her
head off, and on seeing him had fallen in a faint. Not that he thought
it was a real faint. He had unmistakably seen her eyelids quiver. And
when she came to she had ordered him no supper, and four pages of German
translation, and to go to bed at seven o'clock instead of seven-thirty
for a week. All the time crying, too. And then she had sent him to his