I was four and my mother
died. I'm thirteen now. How old are you?"

"I'm twelve," answered Marco.

The Rat twisted his face enviously.

"I wish I was your size! Are you a gentleman's son? You look as if
you were."

"I'm a very poor man's son," was Marco's answer. "My father is a
writer."

"Then, ten to one, he's a sort of gentleman," said The Rat. Then quite
suddenly he threw another question at him. "What's the name of the
other Samavian party?"

"The Maranovitch. The Maranovitch and the Iarovitch have been fighting
with each other for five hundred years. First one dynasty rules, and
then the other gets in when it has killed somebody as it killed King
Maran," Marco answered without hesitation.

"What was the name of the dynasty that ruled before they began
fighting? The first Maranovitch assassinated the last of them," The
Rat asked him.

"The Fedorovitch," said Marco. "The last one was a bad king."

"His son was the one they never found again," said The Rat. "The one
they call the Lost Prince."

Marco would have started but for his long training in exterior
self-control. It was so strange to hear his dream-hero spoken of in
this back alley in a slum, and just after he had been thinking of him.

"What do you know about him?" he asked, and, as he did so, he saw the
group of vagabond lads draw nearer.

"Not much. I only read something about him in a torn magazine I found
in the street," The Rat answered. "The man that wrote about him said
he was only part of a legend, and he laughed at people for believing in
him. He said it was about time that he should turn up again if he
intended to. I've invented things about him because these chaps like
to hear me tell them. They're only stories."

"We likes 'im," a voice called out, "becos 'e wos the right sort; 'e'd
fight, 'e would, if 'e was in Samavia now."

Marco rapidly asked himself how much he might say. He decided and
spoke to them all.

"He is not part of a legend. He's part of Samavian history," he said.
"I know something about him too."

"How did you find it out?" asked The Rat.

"Because my father's a writer, he's obliged to have books and papers,
and he knows things. I like to read, and I go into the free libraries.
You can always get books and papers there. Then I ask my father
questions. All the newspapers are full of things about Samavia just
now." Marco felt that this was an explanation which betrayed nothing.
It was tr