the interview terminated.

V

By this time he was thoroughly tired: he had done a hard morning's work;
not only had he been harassed and annoyed, but he had been thinking a
great deal more than he usually thought, and his brain ached. But even
now his troubles were not ended; just as he turned to go the Minister of
the Interior craved audience; and at his first word the King's
irritation grew afresh, for here was dismissed controversy cropping up
again.

While the King was receiving the Prime Minister his Comptroller-General
had not been idle: indeed he never was idle. He had gone straight to the
Minister of the Interior and had reported to him the failure of his
efforts, for it was this minister who had in the first place come to
him. The steeplejack had fallen, so to speak, right into the middle of
his department; and with the King's donation coming on the top the
catastrophe bulked large. For, be it known, on the order of the day for
the morrow's sitting of Parliament was a motion of the Labor Party,
directing censure on the Government for having brought pressure to bear
on contractors and caused work to be continued upon Government buildings
when Labor and Capital were at war. It was nothing to Labor that the
hire of the scaffolding used in the repairs was costing the country a
considerable sum of money while it stood uselessly waiting about the
walls of the Legislature; blacklegs had gone up on it and blacklegs had
been pulled down from it; and one particular blackleg had gone up on it
and had come down without any pulling whatever--an accident over which
Labor was savagely ready to exult and say, "Serve him right!" And how
would it be if they saw in their morning papers, on the very day when
the motion was down for debate, that the King had gone out of his way to
make a handsome donation to the widow? The Minister of the Interior
simply could not allow it; yet now word had come to him that his Majesty
persisted in his intention. So when the Prime Minister came out the
Minister of the Interior went in and put his case to the King, as I have
put it here to the reader--only far more persuasively, and ornately, and
at very much greater length. He also added to what has already been set
forth, as a point making the man a less worthy object of compassion,
that according to latest accounts he had gone to his work under the
influence of drink.

"So do all steeplejacks," said the King, and quoted the _Encyclopedia_: