lty alone; he saw the throng of humanity standing silent there
before him, and the sweetness and the virtue of the life which he had
put behind. Then for the first time his firm lips trembled, as he lifted
the poor rose to his lips, and kissed it once, in memory of her whom he
was leaving, as he thought. But Mary Lincoln was dead; and as he turned
his face upward, he seemed to see some vision in the sky, and they say
that a great glory shone into his face.

"Fire!" came the word, and the sheet of flame leaped out toward him, and
he fell; and the rose-leaves, scattered by a bullet, lay about him on
the stones.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE LAST ROYALIST.

Geoffrey's jailers were lenient to him after that first day. He was
removed to a room with carpet and furniture; his table was well served;
he was allowed to walk about in the courtyards; books and pen and ink
were given him--everything but newspapers. The fact was that Bagshaw
felt he had gone too far. The vindictiveness, the cruelty of the
populace, was already a thing of the past--of that past when they had
not yet learned their power. The people were good-natured,
impressionable, forgiving; and that low murmur from the street on the
day of Dacre's execution, the third time the President had sought to
make his prisoner betray the King, had well-nigh driven Bagshaw from his
office. It was Richard Lincoln who had saved the government that day, by
his stern rebuke to the President; the latter liked him none the better
for that.

Geoffrey felt this change of sentiment in the manner of his keepers; and
when he remembered that first terrible day, it was but to hope that his
fears had been exaggerated. Undoubtedly John's sentence would be
commuted to imprisonment like his own.

But the more convinced Geoffrey became of this, the more his mind turned
to the other persons of those eventful days. The King had not
come--that was the grim fact--the King had not come to claim his own;
had left his honest gentlemen to fight or fall without him; and no one,
even now, could tell how different the event might have been that day
had George the Fifth but proved his own cause worth defending. Geoffrey,
Dacre, none of them had had news of the King since the day of Aldershot.
Up to the very stroke of noon, as Geoffrey remembered, Dacre had
expected him. But they had waited in vain. And now the White Horse of
Hanover, and with that the Norman Leopard, was a thing of the past. From
his