should know so much and
reason so clearly. It was at least extraordinarily interesting. There
had been no skirmish, no attack, no battle which he had not led and
fought in his own imagination, and he had made scores of rough queer
plans of all that had been or should have been done. Lazarus listened
as attentively as his master, and once Marco saw him exchange a
startled, rapid glance with Loristan. It was at a moment when The Rat
was sketching with his finger on the cloth an attack which OUGHT to
have been made but was not. And Marco knew at once that the quickly
exchanged look meant "He is right! If it had been done, there would
have been victory instead of disaster!"

It was a wonderful meal, though it was only of bread and coffee. The
Rat knew he should never be able to forget it.

Afterward, Loristan told him of what he had done the night before. He
had seen the parish authorities and all had been done which a city
government provides in the case of a pauper's death.

His father would be buried in the usual manner. "We will follow him,"
Loristan said in the end. "You and I and Marco and Lazarus."

The Rat's mouth fell open.

"You--and Marco--and Lazarus!" he exclaimed, staring. "And me! Why
should any of us go? I don't want to. He wouldn't have followed me if
I'd been the one."

Loristan remained silent for a few moments.

"When a life has counted for nothing, the end of it is a lonely thing,"
he said at last. "If it has forgotten all respect for itself, pity is
all that one has left to give. One would like to give SOMETHING to
anything so lonely." He said the last brief sentence after a pause.

"Let us go," Marco said suddenly; and he caught The Rat's hand.

The Rat's own movement was sudden. He slipped from his crutches to a
chair, and sat and gazed at the worn carpet as if he were not looking
at it at all, but at something a long way off. After a while he looked
up at Loristan.

"Do you know what I thought of, all at once?" he said in a shaky voice.
"I thought of that 'Lost Prince' one. He only lived once. Perhaps he
didn't live a long time. Nobody knows. But it's five hundred years
ago, and, just because he was the kind he was, every one that remembers
him thinks of something fine. It's queer, but it does you good just to
hear his name. And if he has been training kings for Samavia all these
centuries--they may have been poor and nobody may have known about
them, but they've b