arty. All Samavia
would rise and follow any flag he chose to raise. They've prayed for
the Lost Prince for five hundred years, and if they believed they'd got
him once more, they'd fight like madmen for him. But there would not
be any one to fight. They'd ALL want the same thing! If they could
see the man with Ivor's blood in his veins, they'd feel he had come
back to them--risen from the dead. They'd believe it!"

He beat his fists together in his frenzy of excitement. "It's the
time! It's the time!" he cried. "No man could let such a chance go
by! He MUST tell them--he MUST. That MUST be what he's gone for. He
knows--he knows--he's always known!" And he threw himself back on his
sofa and flung his arms over his face, lying there panting.

"If it is the time," said Marco in a low, strained voice--"if it is,
and he knows--he will tell them." And he threw his arms up over his
own face and lay quite still.

Neither of them said another word, and the street lamp shone in on them
as if it were waiting for something to happen. But nothing happened.
In time they were asleep.

XXIX

'TWIXT NIGHT AND MORNING

After this, they waited. They did not know what they waited for, nor
could they guess even vaguely how the waiting would end. All that
Lazarus could tell them he told. He would have been willing to stand
respectfully for hours relating to Marco the story of how the period of
their absence had passed for his Master and himself. He told how
Loristan had spoken each day of his son, how he had often been pale
with anxiousness, how in the evenings he had walked to and fro in his
room, deep in thought, as he looked down unseeingly at the carpet.

"He permitted me to talk of you, sir," Lazarus said. "I saw that he
wished to hear your name often. I reminded him of the times when you
had been so young that most children of your age would have been in the
hands of nurses, and yet you were strong and silent and sturdy and
traveled with us as if you were not a child at all--never crying when
you were tired and were not properly fed. As if you understood--as if
you understood," he added, proudly. "If, through the power of God a
creature can be a man at six years old, you were that one. Many a dark
day I have looked into your solemn, watching eyes, and have been half
afraid; because that a child should answer one's gaze so gravely seemed
almost an unearthly thing."

"The chief thing I remember of th