tial breakfast. His small legs
had a toilsome journey before them.

He went through his preparation in a sort of rapt solemnity. So must the
boy crusaders have looked as, starting on their long journey, they faced
south and east, toward the far-distant Sepulcher of Our Lord.

The King's Council went, the Chancellor, the Mayor of the city, wearing
the great gold chain of his office around his neck, and a handful of
soldiers,--a simple pilgrimage and the more affecting. There were no
streaming banners, no magnificent vestments. The Archbishop accompanied
them; and a flag-bearer.

They went on foot to the railway station through lines of kneeling
people, the boy still rapt; and looking straight ahead, the Chancellor
seemingly also absorbed, but keenly alive to the crowds. As he went on,
his face relaxed. It was as if the miracle had already happened. Not the
miracle for which the boy would pray, but a greater one. Surely these
kneeling people, gazing with moist and kindly eyes at the Crown Prince,
could not, at the hot words of demagogues, turn into the mob he feared.
But it had happened before. The people who had, one moment, adored the
Dauphin of France on his balcony at Versailles, had lived to scream for
his life.

On and on, through the silent, crowded streets. No drums; no heralds, no
bugles. First the standard-bearer; then the Archbishop, walking with his
head bent; then the boy, alone and bareheaded, holding his small hat in
moist; excited fingers; then the others, the Chancellor and the Mayor
together, the Council, the guard. So they moved along, without speech,
grave, reverent, earnest.

At the railway station a man stepped out of the crowd and proffered
a paper to the Crown Prince. But he was too absorbed to see it, and a
moment later the Chancellor had it, and was staring with hard eyes at
the individual who had presented it. A moment later, without sound,
or breach of decorum, the man was between two agents, a prisoner. The
paper, which the Chancellor read on the train and carefully preserved,
was a highly seditious document attacking the Government and ending with
threats.

The Chancellor, who had started in an exalted frame of mind, sat
scowling and thoughtful during the journey. How many of those who had
knelt on the street had had similar seditious papers in their pockets? A
people who could kneel, and, kneeling, plot!

The Countess, standing on her balcony and staring down into the valley,
beheld