st sinister of all the sinister influences that perverted the King's
mind--dressed from head to foot in shimmering white satin, lounged on a
divan with all the easy familiarity permitted to this most intimate of
courtiers, the associate of all royal follies.

Gustavus looked over his shoulder as he entered.

"Why, Bjelke," he exclaimed, "I thought you had gone into the country!"

"I am at a loss," replied Bjelke, "to imagine what should have given
Your Majesty so mistaken an impression." And he might have smiled
inwardly to observe how his words seemed to put Gustavus out of
countenance.

The King laughed, nevertheless, with an affectation of ease.

"I inferred it from your absence from Court on such a night. What has
been keeping you?" But, without waiting for an answer, he fired another
question. "What do you say to my domino, Bjelke?"

It was a garment embroidered upon a black satin ground with tongues of
flame so cunningly wrought in mingling threads of scarlet and gold that
as he turned about now they flashed in the candlelight, and seemed to
leap like tongues of living fire.

"Your Majesty will have a great success," said Bjelke, and to himself
relished the full grimness of his joke. For a terrible joke it was,
seeing that he no longer intended to discharge the errand which had
brought him in such haste to the palace.

"Faith, I deserve it!" was the flippant answer, and he turned again to
the mirror to adjust a patch on the left side of his chin. "There is
genius in this domino, and it is not the genius of Francois, for the
scheme of flames is my very own, the fruit of a deal of thought and
study."

There Gustavus uttered his whole character. As a master of the revels,
or an opera impresario, this royal rake would have been a complete
success in life. The pity of it was that the accident of birth should
have robed him in the royal purple. Like many another prince who has
come to a violent end, he was born to the wrong metier.

"I derived the notion," he continued, "from a sanbenito in a Goya
picture."

"An ominous garb," said Bjelke, smiling curiously. "The garment of the
sinner on his way to penitential doom."

Armfelt cried out in a protest of mock horror, but Gustavus laughed
cynically.

"Oh, I confess that it would be most apt. I had not thought of it."

His fingers sought a pomatum box, and in doing so displaced a
toilet-case of red morocco. An oblong paper package fell from the top of
this