e to the face of
Sutphen.

"What is it?" Carter whisperingly inquired of the veteran.

"A bad omen, coming as it does as he enters the house," replied the
soldier in the same low tone, tinged with the superstition of his race.
"I pray God," he continued, "that he turn out no weak-kneed stumbler."

The incident naturally enough had not served to increase the King's
self-confidence. After a glance into the impassive faces of the waiting
servants, he gathered sufficient grace to proceed and look about him,
with eyes more accustomed to the light. With an assumption of ease
foreign to his turbulent heart, he took his way along the splendid hall.
He was soon lost in a professional appreciation of the evidence of royal
circumstance, the glories the succeeding years had generously spared,
and which now were enriched and ripened by Times' deft touch.

From their coigns the priceless portraits of the S. Croix gazed
complacently down upon him. Royalty had aforetimes been of daily habit
to them. Their scornful brows with sombre eyes, their thin curling lips,
appeared to be of some alien race. They seemed to hold themselves aloof
as though he was a child of their one-time serfs, having no claim upon
their bond of caste. Even to himself he felt an impostor, a peasant in a
royal mask. That he was really a king had not yet come home to him. He
felt no embryo greatness struggling to possess him. Upon his face abode
the look of one who dreams of pleasant, impossible things. Half smiling,
he was yet reluctant of the awakening he was sure would come and scatter
forever the wondrous glories of his slumbers. Unwilling that these
creations of pigment, brush and canvas should, by exposing him,
dissipate his fancies, he dropped his gaze to find himself approaching
the entrance of a brilliantly lighted salon.

What lay beyond?

A new world, a new life, an existence such as he had never dreamed of
might be waiting on the thither side. He paused again involuntarily.
Beside the richer scene, with all its priceless relics of another age,
its warmth, its lights, its rows of bowing flunkeys and his new-found
friends, its dream of a crown and distant throne, arose a passing vision
of a life he had laid aside. There the plenty of yesterday melted in the
paucity of to-day. There cringing cold had crept forlornly in and hunger
had been no unexpected guest. There hope and ambition on their brows had
ever borne the bruising thorns of defeat and failur