it seemed a long way
off as he entered. There were many richly dressed people who stood in
line as he passed up toward the canopied dais. He felt that he had
grown pale with the strain of excitement, and he had begun to feel that
he must be walking in a dream, as on each side people bowed low and
curtsied to the ground.

He realized vaguely that the King himself was standing, awaiting his
approach. But as he advanced, each step bearing him nearer to the
throne, the light and color about him, the strangeness and
magnificence, the wildly joyous acclamation of the populace outside the
palace, made him feel rather dazzled, and he did not clearly see any
one single face or thing.

"His Majesty awaits you," said a voice behind him which seemed to be
Baron Rastka's. "Are you faint, sir? You look pale."

He drew himself together, and lifted his eyes. For one full moment,
after he had so lifted them, he stood quite still and straight, looking
into the deep beauty of the royal face. Then he knelt and kissed the
hands held out to him--kissed them both with a passion of boy love and
worship.

The King had the eyes he had longed to see--the King's hands were those
he had longed to feel again upon his shoulder--the King was his father!
the "Stefan Loristan" who had been the last of those who had waited and
labored for Samavia through five hundred years, and who had lived and
died kings, though none of them till now had worn a crown!

His father was the King!

It was not that night, nor the next, nor for many nights that the
telling of the story was completed. The people knew that their King
and his son were rarely separated from each other; that the Prince's
suite of apartments were connected by a private passage with his
father's. The two were bound together by an affection of singular
strength and meaning, and their love for their people added to their
feeling for each other. In the history of what their past had been,
there was a romance which swelled the emotional Samavian heart near to
bursting. By mountain fires, in huts, under the stars, in fields and
in forests, all that was known of their story was told and retold a
thousand times, with sobs of joy and prayer breaking in upon the tale.

But none knew it as it was told in a certain quiet but stately room in
the palace, where the man once known only as "Stefan Loristan," but
whom history would call the first King Ivor of Samavia, told his share
of it to th