wore it on your knees when I was stung beyond endurance by your
baseness. No, Michael," and her voice rose almost to a scream when her
husband tried to silence her with a curse, "you shall hear the truth
now, if I have to ask my son as a last favor to his unhappy mother to
still that foul tongue of yours by force!"

For an instant, she made a wild appeal to Alec. "Your father was an
honorable man," she cried. "For his sake, if not for mine, since I have
forfeited all claim to your love, compel this man to be silent!"

The belief was slowly establishing itself in her son's mind that the
incredible thing he was hearing was actually true. Nevertheless, he was
temporarily bereft of the poise and balance of judgment that might have
enabled him to adjust the warring elements in his bewildered brain. It
was a new and horrible experience to be asked by his mother to use
physical violence against the man he had been taught to regard as his
father.

He had never respected Michael Delgrado,--he could acknowledge that now
without the twinge of conscience that had always accompanied the
unpleasing thought in the past,--yet, despite the gulf already yawning
wide between them, his soul revolted against the notion of laying a hand
on him in anger.

But he did stoop over the spluttering little Prince and said sternly,
"You must not interrupt my mother again! You must not, I tell you!"

Such was the chilling emphasis of his words that Delgrado's loud
objurgations died away in his throat, and the distraught Princess, with
one last look of unutterable contempt at her royal spouse, faced the
other occupants of the room.

"I did harm to none by my innocent deception," she pleaded. "I was very
young when I married Alec's father, who was nearly twenty years older
than I. We were not rich, and we were compelled to live in a rude mining
camp, where my husband owned some claims that seemed to be of little
value. But from the day of our wedding our fortunes began to improve,
and, in the year before my son was born, money poured in on us. That
small collection of wooden shanties has now become a great city. The
land my husband owned is worth ten thousand times its original value;
but, unfortunately, when wealth came, I grew dissatisfied with my
surroundings. I wanted to travel, to mix in society, to become one of
the fashionable throng that flocks to Paris and London and the Riviera
in their seasons. My husband refused to desert the State in