ments."

And Mr. Buck pulled out a bandanna and blew his nose.

"Do you know, Mr. Buck," said the King, staring gloomily at the table,
"the admirable clearness of your reason produces in my mind a
sentiment which I trust I shall not offend you by describing as an
aspiration to punch your head. You irritate me sublimely. What can it
be in me? Is it the relic of a moral sense?"

"But your Majesty," said Barker, eagerly and suavely, "does not refuse
our proposals?"

"My dear Barker, your proposals are as damnable as your manners. I
want to have nothing to do with them. Suppose I stopped them
altogether. What would happen?"

Barker answered in a very low voice--

"Revolution."

The King glanced quickly at the men round the table. They were all
looking down silently: their brows were red.

He rose with a startling suddenness, and an unusual pallor.

"Gentlemen," he said, "you have overruled me. Therefore I can speak
plainly. I think Adam Wayne, who is as mad as a hatter, worth more
than a million of you. But you have the force, and, I admit, the
common sense, and he is lost. Take your eight hundred halberdiers and
smash him. It would be more sportsmanlike to take two hundred."

"More sportsmanlike," said Buck, grimly, "but a great deal less
humane. We are not artists, and streets purple with gore do not catch
our eye in the right way."

"It is pitiful," said Auberon. "With five or six times their number,
there will be no fight at all."

"I hope not," said Buck, rising and adjusting his gloves. "We desire
no fight, your Majesty. We are peaceable business men."

"Well," said the King, wearily, "the conference is at an end at last."

And he went out of the room before any one else could stir.

* * * * *

Forty workmen, a hundred Bayswater Halberdiers, two hundred from
South, and three from North Kensington, assembled at the foot of
Holland Walk and marched up it, under the general direction of Barker,
who looked flushed and happy in full dress. At the end of the
procession a small and sulky figure lingered like an urchin. It was
the King.

"Barker," he said at length, appealingly, "you are an old friend of
mine--you understand my hobbies as I understand yours. Why can't you
let it alone? I hoped that such fun might come out of this Wayne
business. Why can't you let it alone? It doesn't really so much matter
to you--what's a road or so? For me it's the one joke that may save m