sing words which caught
the popular fancy.

A murmur of approval ran through the crowd, which pressed close, in spite
of the police; and as all eyes for the moment turned upon the King, or
upon the white-haired peasant singer, a thing happened which caught my
attention.

The velvet curtain which hid the bearers of the _paso_ resting before the
royal box, parted very slightly at one side, as if someone were peering
out; then a hand darted forth and received from a man in a black coat, who
stood with his back half-turned to me, a faded bouquet of flowers,
arranged Spanish fashion in a hard, stiff pyramid.

Quick as that darting hand a thought flashed through my brain. In a few
seconds the _paso_ would be moving on; the bearers were bracing themselves
for a new effort. That bouquet! if it should hold the threatened bomb?
This was the moment for such an attempt at wrecking the royal box, for the
King was a member of the next brotherhood that must pass; and soon he
would be leaving his sister and friends to walk with it, perhaps not
returning to his box that day.

The passing of light is no more swift than was the flight of these
thoughts; and without waiting to calculate the cost to myself, thinking
only of the King and of the girl I loved, I instantly thrust both hands
between the curtains, following the flowers as they were passed in. I
grasped the bouquet firmly round the stiff base of the pyramid, and pulled
it out before the hidden man who had received it knew that it had not been
withdrawn by his confederate. It was all over in a second, and I had the
bouquet. Also I had identified the man who pushed it through the curtains
of the _paso_, though which among the twenty or twenty-five concealed
bearers had taken it from him I could not tell.

Whether my act had been wise or foolish, it was done, and the _paso_ had
moved on, carrying the secret of one beating heart under the curtained
platform.

Prying cautiously among the tightly banked flowers, my blood quickened as
I touched something round and hard, a thing about the size of a large
orange, fastened into the centre of the pyramid by a network of thin wire.
Intuition had not played me a trick. There was death in this bunch of
roses, death for many, perhaps. Though it was of first importance to get
the bomb as far away as possible from the King and from Monica, and to
render it harmless, I would not give up my pursuit of the man in the black
coat, who was fighti