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Verdayne's lips moved, but no sound came from them to voice the passionate cry in his heart, "My Queen, my Queen!" "I suppose it is only a curious dream! It must be, of course! But it is a very real vision to me, and I would not part with it for the world.

He might have married wherever he had willed, but Society and her fair votaries sighed and smiled in vain, and finally decided to leave him alone, to Verdayne's infinite relief. As for the Boy, he was always, as I have said, a mystery, always a topic for the consideration of the gossips.

He turned away with a sob in his throat and looked into Verdayne's eyes with such an expression of utter hopelessness that the older man felt his own eyes moisten with the fervor of his sympathy. That poor, humble ranchman possessed something that was denied the Boy, prince of the blood though he was.

"It seems," said Peter, with a politeness that his looks belied, "that our friends are not at home." Verdayne's answer sounded very much like an oath. He gave the door one final kick, and finding his rough summons ineffectual, turned to his companions. "Look you!" he said. "I am not at all sure that this house is as empty as it seems.

"Uncle," went on the Boy, wrought up to a high pitch of emotion, and throwing himself down again at Verdayne's feet, "I feel with Louis XVI, 'I am too young to reign! Why haven't I ever had a father to teach and train me in the way I should go? Every boy needs a good father, princes most of all, so much more is expected of us poor royal devils than of more ordinary and more fortunate mortals!

He absorbed the spirit of the big world it typified, and he saw things more clearly than in the crowded city. And yet he suffered more, too. He could not often talk about his sorrow and his loss, but he felt all the time the unspoken sympathy in Verdayne's companionship, and was grateful for the completeness of the understanding between them.

"And I dare say he wasn't the only one who stared!" put in Lady Alice in dry tones of reprehension. "I can't imagine who it could be, can you, mother?" "Not unless it was that strange young Monsieur Zalenska Paul Zalenska, I believe he calls himself Paul Verdayne's guest. I rather think, from the description, that it must have been he!" "Zalenska? What a name!

Still, if Father Paul loved the woman as he certainly must to have remained single for her sake so long it put a different face on the matter, and of course it was Verdayne's affair, not his!