nd the thing she was to do; with the old King very close
to the open door, and Hedwig being fitted for her bridal robe and for
somber black at one fitting.

Troubled times, indeed. The city was smouldering, and from some strange
source had come a new rumor. Nothing less than that the Royalists,
headed by the Chancellor, despairing of crowning the boy Prince, would,
on the King's death, make away with him, thus putting Hedwig on the
throne Hedwig, Queen of Karnia perhaps already by secret marriage.

The city, which adored the boy, was seething. The rumor had originated
with Olga Loschek, who had given it to the Committee as a useful weapon.
Thus would she have her revenge on those of the Palace, and at the same
time secure her own safety. Revenge, indeed, for she knew the way of
such rumors, how they fly from house to house, street to street. How the
innocent, proclaiming their innocence, look even the more guilty.

When she had placed the scheme before the Committee of Ten, had seen the
eagerness with which they grasped it--"In this way," she had said, in
her scornful, incisive tones, "the onus of the boy is not on you, but
on them. Even those who have no sympathy with your movement will burn
at such a rumor. The better the citizen, the more a lover of home and
order, the more outraged he will be. Every man in the city with a child
of his own will rise against the Palace."

"Madame," the leader had said, "you should be of the Committee."

But she had ignored the speech contemptuously, and gone on to other
things.

Now everything was arranged. Black Humbert had put his niece to work on
a Carnival dress for a small boy, and had stayed her curiosity by a hint
that it was for the American lad.

"They are comfortable tenants," he had said. "Not lavish, perhaps, as
rich Americans should be, but orderly, and pleasant. The boy has good
manners. It would be well to please him."

So the niece, sewing in the back room, watched Bobby in and out, with
pleasant mysteries in her eyes, and sewing sang the song the cathedral
chimed:

"Draw me also, Mary mild,
To adore Thee and thy Child!
Mary mild,
Star in desert drear and wild."

So she sang, and sewed, and measured Bobby's height as he passed by the
wainscoting in the passage, and cunningly cut a pattern.

"So high," she reflected, humming, "is his shoulder. And so, to this
panel, should go the little trousers. 'S