as credibly informed
that a man who headed with twenty thousand pounds the list of a charity
bearing my mother's name, has been allowed by the police to get out of
this country scot free--though guilty of infamous conduct,--merely
because the contribution of that tainted donation to a royal fund would
not have 'looked well.'"

"Oh, stop talking to me, Max!" cried the King, made irritable by his
increased sense of helplessness. "Go and do what you like, say what you
like, report what you like; you've got the Commission to play with; run
it for all it is worth; but for Heaven's sake let me have peace for a
while! Why should you trouble me? You know that I can do nothing."

"You have done a great deal," said Max, whose admiration for his father
had grown very considerably during the past year.

"I have missed doing a great deal; but of that you know nothing, and I'm
not going to tell you." And then he could stand it no more. "Do you
imagine I should have made you that idiotic promise," he cried, "if I
had supposed for a moment that I should still be here when you came to
claim it?" And so saying he got up and, diplomatic in retreat, hurried
out of the room.

Max, left to his own surmisings, opened wide and wondering eyes. "Did he
throw that bomb at himself?" he murmured in astonishment. "It looks very
much as if he did."

II

Parliament opened again without any difficulty in the middle of
December; and the enormous popularity of the King and Queen was greatly
enhanced by the circumstance of their reappearance within so short a
time for an occasion so closely similar. Only another bomb could have
increased the favorable impression made upon the populace by their
affable return to the charge--if a slow walking-pace may be so
described--within three weeks of the attempted outrage.

As the Prime Minister had promised the police spared no pains to insure
their safety, and behind the hoardings of the new Government offices
detectives were packed like herrings in a barrel, with special eye-holes
bored through so that they might note the actual passing of the royal
carriage, and have it well under observation at the point of danger
which was, presumably, that at which the last explosion had occurred.
Then the whole police force held its breath, and the coach got past
without any difficulty; and immediately the waiting multitude in Regency
Row became violently demonstrative as though some great acrobatic feat
had been ac