d the King, "the folly of the official mind is past
all believing,--especially when it concentrates itself in the police
force! Let somebody go to that poor child and tell her that her father
and mother have had a bomb thrown at them, and are trying to recover
themselves in the grief caused by her absence! And then unchain her (you
keep them in chains, I suppose?), open the door of her prison, and see
how she'll run! And tell the Prefect," he added, "that I cannot present
him with my compliments."

The King was quite right. In case Charlotte should refuse to believe the
official word, she was shown a newspaper with lurid illustrations; and
within an hour's time she was back at the palace, weeping, holding her
father and mother alternately in her arms, and scolding them for all the
world as though they had been guilty of outrageous behavior, and not
she.

And, after all, it was a very good way of getting over the preliminaries
of a rather awkward meeting.

IV

But when the first transports of joy at that reunion were over, they had
to settle down to naughty facts and talk with serious disapproval to
Charlotte of her past doings. And as they did so, though she still wept
a little, the Princess observed with secret satisfaction that she had at
any rate cured her mother of one thing--of knitting, namely, while a
daughter's fate was being dangled in the parental balance.

From that day on when Charlotte showed that she was really in earnest
the Queen put down her knitting; and those who have lived under certain
domestic conditions where tyranny is always, as though by divine right,
benevolent, wise, self-confident, and self-satisfied to the verge of
conceit, will recognize that this in itself was no inconsiderable
triumph.

Charlotte was quite straightforward as to why she had done the thing;
she had done it partly out of generous enthusiasm for a cause which she
did not very well understand, but to which certain friends of hers had
attached themselves with a blind and dogged obstinacy (two of those
friends she had left in prison behind her); but more because she wished
to supply an object lesson of what she was really like to the Prince of
Schnapps-Wasser.

She insisted that he was to be told all about it. And the Queen was in
despair.

"Tell him that you have been in jail like a common criminal for
assaulting the police? I couldn't, it would break my heart! I should die
of the shame of it."

"Very well," sai