at his shoulder; but he
shook himself free brutally.

"It is full time you knew what I have done for you," he hissed
venomously at Alec. "Stampoff and your mother and I, alone of those in
this room, are aware of the fraud that has been perpetrated on the
people of this country. You are not King of Kosnovia. You are not my
son. Your father was a Colorado gold miner to whom your mother was
married before I met her, and who died before you were born. For the
sake of his widow's money I gave her my name, and was fool enough to
fall in with her whim of pride that you should be brought up as a Prince
Delgrado. I suppose Stampoff urged your mother to reveal the facts to
that chit of a girl who has addled your brain, and she, fortunately, had
sense enough to see that you can not continue to occupy the throne five
seconds after it becomes known that you are a mere alien, that your name
is Alexander Talbot, and that I, Michael Delgrado, who married a
foreigner in order that I might live, and permitted an American child to
be reared as a lawful Prince of my house, am the lawful King."

The little man strutted up and down the room in a fume of indignation,
and evidently felt fully justified in his own esteem. Ever selfish and
vain, he fancied that he had been the victim of a cruel fate, and he
read the sheer bewilderment in Alec's face as a tribute to the master
stroke he had just delivered.

But his self conceit wilted under the contemptuous scorn of his wife's
gaze, which he chanced to meet when his posturing ceased.

Alec looked to his mother for some confirmation or denial of the
astounding statement blurted forth by her husband. But she had no eyes
for her son then. The wrongs and sufferings of a lifetime were welling
up from her heart to her lips. The agonized suspense of the last few
minutes had given way to the frenzy of a woman outraged in her deepest
sentiments.

She relinquished the chair to which she had been clinging, and faced the
diminutive Prince with a quiet dignity that overawed him.

"So that is how you keep your oath, Michael!" she said. "When I forgave
your infidelities, when I pandered to your extravagance, when I allowed
you to fritter away the wealth bequeathed to me by a man whose fine
nature was so far removed from yours that I have often wondered why God
created two such opposite types of humanity, time and again you vowed
that the idle folly of my youth would never be revealed by you. Twice
you s