ly aside, as I turned from the window, he peered in;
and saw just what he had been led to expect--a huddled form covered
with dingy bed-clothes and a grey head lying on a ragged, yellow
pillow. The man's face was turned to the wall; but, as the light fell
on him, he sighed and, with a shiver, began to move. The King dropped
the curtain.

The adventure had not turned out as well as he had hoped; and, with a
whimsical look at me, he laid a crown on the table, said a kind word to
the boy, and we went out. In a moment we were in the street.

It was my turn now to rally him, and I did so without mercy; asking if
he knew of any other beauteous damsel who wanted her shutter closed,
and whether this was the usual end of his adventures. He took the jest
in good part, laughing fully as loudly at himself as I laughed; and in
this way we had gone a hundred paces or so very merrily, when, on a
sudden, he stopped.

"What is it, sire?" I asked.

"Hola!" he said, "The boy was clean."

"Clean?"

"Yes; hands, face, clothes. All clean."

"Well, sire?"

"How could he be? His father in bed, no one even to close the shutter.
How could he be clean?"

"But, if he was, sire?"

For answer Henry seized me by the arm, turned me round without a word,
and in a moment was hurrying me back to the house. I thought that he
was going thither again, and followed reluctantly; but twenty paces
short of the door he crossed the street, and drew me into a doorway.
"Can you see the shutter?" he said. "Yes? Then watch it, my friend."

I had no option but to resign myself, and I nodded. A moist and chilly
wind, which blew through the street and penetrating our cloaks made us
shiver, did not tend to increase my enthusiasm; but the King was proof
even against this, as well as against the kennel smells and the tedium
of waiting, and presently his persistence was rewarded. The shutter
swung slowly open, the noise made by its collision with the wall coming
clearly to our ears. A minute later the boy appeared in the doorway,
and stood looking up and down.

"Well," the King whispered in my ear, "what do you make of that, my
friend?"

I muttered that it must be a beggar's trick.

"They would not earn a crown in a month," he answered. "There must be
something more than that at the bottom of it."

Beginning to share his curiosity, I was about to propose that we should
sally out and see if the boy would repeat his overture to us, when I
c