n
from that quarter could be easily repulsed by cutting the dikes and
drowning the invaders. The sea, he taught Boyne, was the great defence
of Holland, and it was a waste of money to keep such an army as the
Dutch had; but neither the sea nor the sword could drive out the Germans
if once they insidiously married a Prussian prince to the Dutch Queen.

There seemed to be no getting away from the Queen, for Boyne. The valet
not only talked about her, as the pleasantest subject which he could
find, but he insisted upon showing Boyne all her palaces. He took
him into the Parliament house, and showed him where she sat while the
queen-mother read the address from the throne. He introduced him at a
bazar where the shop-girl who spoke English better than Boyne, or at
least without the central Ohio accent, wanted to sell him a miniature of
the Queen on porcelain. She said the Queen was such a nice girl, and she
was herself such a nice girl that Boyne blushed a little in looking at
her. He bought the miniature, and then he did not know what to do with
it; if any of the family, if Lottie, found out that he had it, or that
Trannel, he should have no peace any more. He put it in his pocket,
provisionally, and when he came giddily out of the shop he felt himself
taken by the elbow and placed against the wall by the valet, who said
the queens were coming. They drove down slowly through the crowded,
narrow street, bowing right and left to the people flattened against the
shops, and again Boyne saw her so near that he could have reached out
his hand and almost touched hers.

The consciousness of this was so strong in him that he wondered whether
he had not tried to do so. If he had he would have been arrested--he
knew that; and so he knew that he had not done it. He knew that he
imagined doing so because it would be so awful to have done it, and he
imagined being in love with her because it would be so frantic. At
the same time he dramatized an event in which he died for her, and
she became aware of his hopeless passion at the last moment, while the
anarchist from whom he had saved her confessed that the bomb had been
meant for her. Perhaps it was a pistol.

He escaped from the valet as soon as he could, and went back to
Scheveningen limp from this experience, but the queens were before
him. They had driven down to visit the studio of a famous Dutch painter
there, and again the doom was on Boyne to press forward with the
other specta