unity to serve
the King. His instructions had been to win into their confidence and do
what he could.

* * * * *

Two weeks later, in the small garden giving off from the King's private
apartments, and perched half-way up the buttressed side of the rock on
which sat the Palace, Karyl impatiently awaited the coming of Colonel
Von Ritz. Below he could hear a brass band in the Botanical Gardens and
out in the bay a German war-ship, decorated for a dance, blazed like a
set piece in a pyrotechnic display.

There was peace, summer, perfume, in the moonlit air and Karyl smiled
ironically as he reflected that even the bodyguard so carefully selected
by Von Ritz might at any moment enter the place and raise the shout of
"Long live King Louis!"

Leaning over the parapet, he could see one of his fantastically
uniformed soldiery pacing back and forth before a sentry-box, his musket
jauntily shouldered, and a bayonet glinting at his belt. Karyl stood
looking, and his lips curled skeptically as he wondered whether the man
would repel or admit assassins.

Somewhat wearily the King turned and leaned on the stone coping of the
outer wall. He was at one end where a shadow cloaked him, but he lighted
a cigarette and the match that flared up threw an orange-red light on
his face, showing eyes which were lusterless. For a few moments he held
the match in his hollowed palms, coaxing its blaze in the breeze. Before
it had burned out there came a sharp report and Karyl heard the spat of
flattening lead on the masonry at his back. The echo rattled along the
rocky side of the hill. One of the sentry-boxes had answered his unasked
question of loyalty.

He waited. There was no rush of feet. No medley of anxiously inquiring
voices. Others had heard the report, of course, yet no one hastened to
inquire and investigate. The King, pacing farther back where his
silhouette was less clearly defined, laughed again, very bitterly.

Finally Von Ritz came. "It seems that we can rely on no one," he said.
"The Palace Guard had been picked from the few in whom I still believed.
I had hoped there was a trustworthy remnant."

"One of them has just tried a shot at me with one of my own muskets."
The King spoke impersonally as though the matter bore only on the
psychic question of trusting men. "The spot is there on the wall." Then
he added with bitter whimsicality: "It seems to me, Colonel, that we
have either very poor mar