d, he had thought,
could be but small--though somewhere he knew there was London where the
Queen lived, and in London were Buckingham Palace and St. James Palace
and Kensington and the Tower, where heads had been chopped off; and the
Horse Guards, where splendid, plumed soldiers rode forth glittering,
with thrilling trumpets sounding as they moved. These last he always
remembered, because he had seen them, and once when he had walked in
the park with his nurse there had been an excited stir in the Row,
and people had crowded about a certain gate, through which an escorted
carriage had been driven, and he had been made at once to take off his
hat and stand bareheaded until it passed, because it was the Queen.
Somehow from that afternoon he dated the first presentation of certain
vaguely miserable ideas. Inquiries made of his attendant, when the
cortege had swept by, had elicited the fact that the Royal Lady herself
had children--little boys who were princes and little girls who were
princesses. What curious and persistent child cross-examination on his
part had drawn forth the fact that almost all the people who drove about
and looked so happy and brilliant, were the fathers or mothers of little
boys like, yet--in some mysterious way--unlike himself? And in what
manner had he gathered that he was different from them? His nurse, it
is true, was not a pleasant person, and had an injured and resentful
bearing. In later years he realised that it had been the bearing of an
irregularly paid menial, who rebelled against the fact that her place
was not among people who were of distinction and high repute, and whose
households bestowed a certain social status upon their servitors. She
was a tall woman with a sour face and a bearing which conveyed a glum
endurance of a position beneath her. Yes, it had been from her--Brough
her name was--that he had mysteriously gathered that he was not a
desirable charge, as regarded from the point of the servants' hall--or,
in fact, from any other point. His people were not the people whose
patronage was sought with anxious eagerness. For some reason their town
house was objectionable, and Mount Dunstan was without attractions.
Other big houses were, in some marked way, different. The town house he
objected to himself as being gloomy and ugly, and possessing only a bare
and battered nursery, from whose windows one could not even obtain a
satisfactory view of the Mews, where at least, there were ho