e to my interview of the past evening. I had gone to bed with
my mind full of sad stories of the deaths of kings. Magnificence in
tatters has always affected my pity more deeply than tatters with no
such antecedent, and a monarch out at elbows stood for me as the last
irony of our mortal life. Here was a king whose misfortunes could find
no parallel. He had been in his youth the hero of a high adventure,
and his middle age had been spent in fleeting among the courts of
Europe, and waiting as pensioner on the whims of his foolish but
regnant brethren. I had heard tales of a growing sottishness, a
decline in spirit, a squalid taste in pleasures. Small blame, I had
always thought, to so ill-fated a princeling. And now I had chanced
upon the gentleman in his dotage, travelling with a barren effort at
mystery, attended by a sad-faced daughter and two ancient domestics.
It was a lesson in the vanity of human wishes which the shallowest
moralist would have noted. Nay, I felt more than the moral. Something
human and kindly in the old fellow had caught my fancy. The decadence
was too tragic to prose about, the decadent too human to moralise on.
I had left the chamber of the--shall I say de jure King of England?--a
sentimental adherent of the cause. But this business of the bagpipes
touched the comic. To harry an old valet out of bed and set him
droning on pipes in the small hours smacked of a theatrical taste, or
at least of an undignified fancy. Kings in exile, if they wish to keep
the tragic air, should not indulge in such fantastic serenades.

My mind changed again when after breakfast I fell in with Madame on the
stair. She drew aside to let me pass, and then made as if she would
speak to me. I gave her good-morning, and, my mind being full of her
story, addressed her as "Excellency."

"I see, sir," she said, "That you know the truth. I have to ask your
forbearance for the concealment I practised yesterday. It was a poor
requital for your generosity, but is it one of the shifts of our sad
fortune. An uncrowned king must go in disguise or risk the laughter of
every stable-boy. Besides, we are too poor to travel in state, even if
we desired it."

Honestly, I knew not what to say. I was not asked to sympathise, having
already revealed my politics, and yet the case cried out for sympathy.
You remember, my dear aunt, the good Lady Culham, who was our
Dorsetshire neighbour, and tried hard to mend my ways at Carte