efore they had got the lease of
the site for it. Had not he himself bought all the option without
having even seen the site? The fact was that he had had no leisure in
his short royal career for such details as seeing the site. He was now
about to make good the omission.

It is a fact that as he turned northwards from Piccadilly Circus, to
the right of the County Fire Office, in order to spy out the land upon
which his theatre was to be built, he hesitated, under the delusion
that all the passers-by were staring at him! He felt just as he might
have felt had he been engaged upon some scheme nefarious. He even went
back and pretended to examine the windows of the County Fire
Office. Then, glancing self-consciously about, he discerned--not
unnaturally--the words "Regent Street" on a sign.

"There you are!" he murmured, with a thrill. "There you are! There's
obviously only one name for that theatre--'The Regent.' It's close to
Regent Street. No other theatre is called 'The Regent.' Nobody
before ever had the idea of 'Regent' as a name for a theatre. 'Muses'
indeed!... 'Intellectual'! ... 'The Regent Theatre'! How well it comes
off the tongue! It's a great name! It'll be the finest name of any
theatre in London! And it took yours truly to think of it!"

Then he smiled privately at his own weakness.... He too, like the
despised Rose, was baptizing the unborn! Still, he continued to dream
of the theatre, and began to picture to himself the ideal theatre.
He discovered that he had quite a number of startling ideas about
theatre-construction, based on his own experience as a playgoer.

When, with new courage, he directed his feet towards the site, upon
which he knew there was an old chapel known as Queen's Glasshouse
Chapel, whose ownership had slipped from the nerveless hand of a dying
sect of dissenters, he could not find the site and he could not see
the chapel. For an instant he was perturbed by a horrid suspicion that
he had been victimized by a gang of swindlers posing as celebrated
persons. Everything was possible in this world and century! None
of the people who had appeared in the transaction had resembled his
previous conceptions of such people! And confidence-thieves always
operated in the grandest hotels! He immediately decided that if the
sequel should prove him to be a simpleton and gull, he would at any
rate be a silent simpleton and gull. He would stoically bear the loss
of two hundred pounds and breathe no