so to speak, to
be taking part in the joke. They marched and wheeled into position
with an almost startling dignity and discipline.

They carried a yellow banner with a great red lion, named by the King
as the Notting Hill emblem, after a small public-house in the
neighbourhood, which he once frequented.

Between the two lines of his followers there advanced towards the King
a tall, red-haired young man, with high features and bold blue eyes.
He would have been called handsome, but that a certain indefinable air
of his nose being too big for his face, and his feet for his legs,
gave him a look of awkwardness and extreme youth. His robes were red,
according to the King's heraldry, and, alone among the Provosts, he
was girt with a great sword. This was Adam Wayne, the intractable
Provost of Notting Hill.

The King flung himself back in his chair, and rubbed his hands.

"What a day, what a day!" he said to himself. "Now there'll be a row.
I'd no idea it would be such fun as it is. These Provosts are so very
indignant, so very reasonable, so very right. This fellow, by the look
in his eyes, is even more indignant than the rest. No sign in those
large blue eyes, at any rate, of ever having heard of a joke. He'll
remonstrate with the others, and they'll remonstrate with him, and
they'll all make themselves sumptuously happy remonstrating with me."

"Welcome, my Lord," he said aloud. "What news from the Hill of a
Hundred Legends? What have you for the ear of your King? I know that
troubles have arisen between you and these others, our cousins, but
these troubles it shall be our pride to compose. And I doubt not, and
cannot doubt, that your love for me is not less tender, no less
ardent, than theirs."

Mr. Buck made a bitter face, and James Barker's nostrils curled;
Wilson began to giggle faintly, and the Provost of West Kensington
followed in a smothered way. But the big blue eyes of Adam Wayne never
changed, and he called out in an odd, boyish voice down the hall--

"I bring homage to my King. I bring him the only thing I have--my
sword."

And with a great gesture he flung it down on the ground, and knelt on
one knee behind it.

There was a dead silence.

"I beg your pardon," said the King, blankly.

"You speak well, sire," said Adam Wayne, "as you ever speak, when you
say that my love is not less than the love of these. Small would it be
if it were not more. For I am the heir of your scheme--the child of
the