number of really important documents
had been left over for this day, devoted to what may be described as
routine signatures. As a rule it was the Comptroller who, out of his
long experience, selected those documents which must be read and, only
after due consideration, signed. Now, by some accident, he had been
prevented from attending, and here was a crowd of important documents,
the terms of which the King had never heard. He began to wonder. At
least ten or a dozen were strange to him: he ordered them to be set
aside. And now very dimly, very gradually, he began to suspect his
position, and to perceive that without watchfulness he might very easily
become less a conscious instrument of Government than a mere mechanism.
What if he had become that already?

II

And then it grew dusk. The King dismissed his secretaries, and without
turning on the light sat and thought alone. The effervescence had all
gone from his brain, melancholy ruled him; and as he sat ruminating upon
the past and his own present position his mind became obsessed by all
the historical characters who had preceded him in the exercise of those
royal functions now grown so exiguous in his hands, who had sat and
labored at Statecraft in that very room, some of them, perhaps, in the
very chair in which he was now seated.

They became almost present to his consciousness. How would they have
behaved in the present situation? How would they have set to work to add
luster to that supreme symbol which still crowned the constitutional
edifice?

He could imagine his own father opposing over a considerable period the
weight of his personal prestige to the importunacy of ministers, saying
with stately ease: "We will speak of that, gentlemen, some other day,"
and so calmly turning from the subject in dispute--not solving it, but
at least imposing delay as the penalty which ministers must pay for a
difference of opinion. That policy of quiet procrastination no minister
of his time would have dared to withstand without first making for it a
certain time-allowance. So much at least would have been secured, not of
right, but through the weight of a stronger personality.

And what about others before him? Slowly there dawned upon the King's
vision--clear as though he had seen her but yesterday, the regal
presence of a certain ancestress who more than any other had made the
monarchy what it now was--an almost miraculous survival from the past.
It was the old Que