e. There wealth was a
surprising stranger and poverty a daily friend. Friends! Friends! Yes,
friends leal and true, a crust for one had meant a meal for all. Such
had been real friends. Their jests had banished every aching care and
solaced each careless curse of fate. Would this new life give as much?
Could the new life give him more? Would even the "glory that was Greece
and the splendor that was Rome" repay him for the sleepless nights, the
watchful anxious days of him who fought, who ruled, who trembled upon an
uncertain throne?

Having chosen he feared to turn back, lest men should call him a craven
and coward. Sensual visions of a greater luxury than this around him
came to console him as the picture of the attic life slipped from him.

He stepped beyond the boundaries of regret into the radiant portals of
the salon.

A woman stood before him.

Unconsciously his fingers itched for the abandoned brush while his thumb
crooked longingly for the discarded palette. Here was a subject fit for
his Muse, a Jeanne d'Arc whose soul was beaming from her luminous eyes.
Not that maid of visions and fought fields, but as she hung
flame-tortured in the open square of Rouen. No peasant soul this, rather
a royal maiden burning on the altars of her country. Awkward and
speechless he stood before her. Instinct apprised him that this was no
other than Trusia, waiting to receive her King.

Her head was held high in regal pride, but her eyes were the wide dark
eyes of a fawn, fear-haunted, at the gaze. Her throat and shoulders
gleamed white as starlight while her tapering arms would have urged an
envious sigh from a Phidias or a David. Her gown of silk was snow white;
the light clung to its watered woof waving and trembling in its folds as
though upon a frosted glass. Diagonally from right to left across her
breast descended a great red ribbon upon whose way the jeweled Lion of
Krovitch rose and fell above her throbbing heart. This with her diamond
coronet were her only jewels. The high spirited, whole-souled girl was
face to face at last with the man she had vowed to marry to give her
land a king.

Unswervingly her fearless eyes probed to the soul of Stovik and dragged
it forth to weigh it in the balance with her own. Fate had denied her
heart the right of choosing, so she had prayed that at least her King
should be great and strong of soul. Fate in mockery had placed before
her an ordinary man to rule her people and her future