em to bring it to you, so that you
may give them an answer. Have any of them brought you the petition,
papa?"

The King shook his head.

"You see, they do nothing! And so the women go again, and again, and
again, taking their petition with them; and because they are trying to
get to you--to say that their grievances shall be looked into, and
something done about them--because of that they are being beaten and
bruised in the streets; and when they won't turn back then they are
arrested and sent to prison."

By this time Charlotte was weeping.

"They may be quite wrong," she cried, "foolish and impossible in their
demands; they may have no grievances worth troubling about--though if
so, why are they troubling as they do?--but they have the right, under
the old law, for those grievances to be inquired into and considered and
decided about. And Parliament won't do it; it is too busy about other
things, grievances that aren't a bit more real, and about which people
haven't been petitioning at all. But you, papa (if that petition came to
you), would have the right to make them attend to it. And they know it;
and that's why they won't let you hear anything about it."

The King's conscience was beginning to be troubled. He had no confidence
either in the good sense or the uprightness of his ministers to fall
back upon; and he saw that his daughter, though she knew so little about
the merits of the case, was very much in earnest. She had caught his
hand and was holding it; she kissed it, and he could feel the dropping
of warm tears.

"Very well, my dear," he said, "very well; I promise that this shall be
looked into."

"Oh, papa!" she cried joyfully. "It was partly for that--just a little,
not all, of course--that I went to prison."

"Then you ought not to have been so foolish. Why could you not have come
to me?"

"I don't think you would have attended; not so much as you do now."

And the King had to admit how, perhaps, that was true.

"Well, my dear," he said again, "I promise that it shall be seen to. No,
I shan't forget."

And then she kissed him and thanked him, and went away comforted. And
when he was alone he got down the index volume of Professor Teller's
_Constitutional History_, and after some search under the heading of
"Petitions" found indeed that Charlotte was right, and that the power to
send messages to Parliament for the remedying of abuses was still his
own.

CHAPTER XVII

THE INCREDIB