gesture of inquiry, could see through the two open doors of a little
azure walled antechamber the wireless operator in the turret working at
his incessant transcription. Two pompously uniformed messengers waited
listlessly in this apartment. The room was furnished with a stately
dignity, and had in the middle of it a big green baize-covered table
with the massive white metal inkpots and antiquated sandboxes natural to
a new but romantic monarchy. It was the king's council chamber and
about it now, in attitudes of suspended intrigue, stood the half-dozen
ministers who constituted his cabinet. They had been summoned for twelve
o'clock, but still at half-past twelve the king loitered in the balcony
and seemed to be waiting for some news that did not come.

The king and his minister had talked at first in whispers; they had
fallen silent, for they found little now to express except a vague
anxiety. Away there on the mountain side were the white metal roofs of
the long farm buildings beneath which the bomb factory and the bombs
were hidden. (The chemist who had made all these for the king had died
suddenly after the declaration of Brissago.) Nobody knew of that store
of mischief now but the king and his adviser and three heavily faithful
attendants; the aviators who waited now in the midday blaze with
their bomb-carrying machines and their passenger bomb-throwers in the
exercising grounds of the motor-cyclist barracks below were still in
ignorance of the position of the ammunition they were presently to take
up. It was time they started if the scheme was to work as Pestovitch
had planned it. It was a magnificent plan. It aimed at no less than the
Empire of the World. The government of idealists and professors away
there at Brissago was to be blown to fragments, and then east, west,
north, and south those aeroplanes would go swarming over a world that
had disarmed itself, to proclaim Ferdinand Charles, the new Caesar, the
Master, Lord of the Earth. It was a magnificent plan. But the tension
of this waiting for news of the success of the first blow
was--considerable.

The Slavic fox was of a pallid fairness, he had a remarkably long nose,
a thick, short moustache, and small blue eyes that were a little too
near together to be pleasant. It was his habit to worry his moustache
with short, nervous tugs whenever his restless mind troubled him, and
now this motion was becoming so incessant that it irked Pestovitch
beyond the limit