Let us stop," Manuel shouted into his ear above the roar of the
carnival clamor. "The Royal carriage comes."

Between a garden and the pavement ran a stone coping, topped by a tall
iron grill, and laden with screening vines. The two men mounted this
masonry and clung to the iron bars, as the crowd was driven back from
the street by the outriders. Before Benton's eyes the whole mass of
humanity swam in a blur of confusion and vertigo. The passing files of
blue and red soldiery seemed wavering figures mounted on reeling horses.
The King's carriage swung into view and a crescendo of cheering went up
from the crowd.

Benton saw blurred circles of color whirling dizzily about a steady
center, and the center was the slender woman at Karyl's side, who was
the day after to-morrow to become his Queen. He saw the fixed smile with
which she tried to acknowledge the salutations as the crowd eddied about
her carriage. Her wide, stricken eyes were shimmery with imprisoned
tears. To drive through the streets of Puntal with that half-stunned
misery written clear in lips and eyes, she must, he knew, have reached
the outmost border of endurance. Karyl bent solicitously forward and
spoke, and she nodded as if answering in a dream, smiling wanly. It was
all as some young Queen might have gone to the guillotine rather than to
her coronation. As she looked bewilderedly from side to side her glance
fell upon the clustering flowers of the vine. Benton gripped the iron
bars and groaned, and then her eyes met his. For a moment her pupils
dilated and one gloved hand convulsively tightened on the paneling of
the carriage door. The man dropped into the crowd and was swallowed up,
and he knew by her familiar gesture of brushing something away from her
temples, that she believed she had seen an image projected from a
troubled brain.

"Come," he said brokenly to his companion, "for God's sake get me out of
this crowd."

* * * * *

The Strangers' Club of Puntal sits high on a solid wall of rock and
overlooks the sea. Its beauty is too full of wizardry to seem real, and
what nature had done in view and sub-tropical luxuriance the syndicate
which operates the ball rooms, tea gardens, and roulette wheels has
striven to abet. To-night a moon two-thirds full immersed the grounds in
a bath of blue and silver, and far off below the cliff wall the
Mediterranean was phosphorescent. In the room where the _croupiers_ spun
the