seless, events must take their
course; once more he felt himself the sport of fate--a mere chip
floating with the stream.

"Very well, Mr. Prime Minister," he said with resignation, "the
Abdication is withdrawn."

He sighed deeply; and then (when left alone to his cogitations), for
such weak comfort as the mere saving of his face could lend, this
thought occurred to him,--"What a good thing that I told nobody about
it." Even Max did not know.

And so in the year of his Jubilee, and the plenitude of his popularity,
John of Jingalo continued to reign; and was, in consequence, the most
saddened and humiliated monarch who ever bowed his head under a crown
and resigned his freedom to a mixed sense of duty and a fear of what
people might say.

CHAPTER XVI

CONCEALMENT AND DISCOVERY

I

There was plenty of hue and cry to discover the perpetrator of the
outrage, but nothing came of it. From somewhere in that labyrinth of
unfinished building and scaffolding fenced in by high hoardings a bomb
had been thrown of insufficient power to do much damage to anybody. The
Prefect of Police, riding in close attendance on the royal carriage, had
himself vaulted the barrier, on the side whence it had seemed to come,
and reported that he had found no trace of any one. Pieces of the shell
had been collected upon the spot, they had not flown very far, nor were
they much broken; and experts of the detective department had been busy
putting together the bits.

The whole performance turned out on investigation to have been so feeble
and amateurish that suspicion rapidly descended from the more
experienced practitioners of anarchy, imported from other countries, to
home-products of later growth--strikers made desperate and savage by the
recent sentences upon their leaders, or, as some would have it, the
Women Chartists, hoping by an attack upon royalty to bring a neglectful
ministry to its senses. As there were no real clues except those which
industriously led nowhere and which the police seemed delightedly to
follow, everybody was free to lay the charge against any agitating
section of the community which they happened to regard with special
disfavor; and for that reason the Women Chartists did, in fact, get most
of the blame.

But in the process they also reaped a certain advantage; the mere
suspicion, though malice directed it, was good for them. Had it been
possible to convict them, their cause would have gone down for