that wears spectacles and has a tenor voice and does little water-colors is a blot on my 'scutcheon; yes, almost a bar sinister." "Sire," interposed the cardinal archbishop, "judge not a wine by its bottle," and he imagined he was quoting the Scripture. No one present could prove him wrong.

"Very well, gentlemen," resumed the king, "I am glad you take the matter so easily. I wash my hands of it. Henceforth Charles-Edward belongs to you. Do with him as you see fit."

He rose and, withdrawing, broke up the conference; but the minister to France, Count Michael of Tretz, who had been summoned in haste from Paris for the occasion, and the premier lingered after the others.

"It passed off beautifully," whispered the premier.

"Yes; well enough," replied the minister. "There is no doubt he will go?" "None at all. The doubt is, will he stay?"

"Will a young man of twenty-one stay in Paris? Your Excellency, have you never been to Paris?"

"Never," answered the premier, with a sigh.

"Well, then, that is the only reason you are not there now. Paris is not a place one leaves."

"It will be our duty, yours and mine, to keep him there forever. He must be made to bind himself there, to form unbreakable ties that shall keep him from Kervia the rest of his life."

"And then?" queried Tretz. "And then, if anything should happen to both his Majesty and the crown prince

"Yes?"

"Why, then we should have CharlesEdward out of the way and Prince Joscelyn would succeed to the throne. You see the idea?"

"Yes," replied the minister dryly; "I know Prince Joscelyn and I see the idea."

II

A WEEK later, near midnight, CharlesEdward arrived at the Gare St. Lazare accompanied by a person who filled the intricate position of valet and guardian.

This was a kindly, motherly old man, a retired corporal of the House Guards, who, ever since he had reached the age when his feeble neck could no longer hold his shako erect, had been retained about the palace as a gentleman-in-waiting to the young prince. For some reason, which the king, at any rate, could not fathom, Corporal Toblach became foolishly fond of Charles-Edward. The king put it down to spaniel devotion.

And so it was Toblach that tottered under Charles-Edward's hand-luggage when they descended from the Rapide at the Gare St. Lazare. The prince, a little bewildered, but his eyes shining behind his spectacles, followed him closely; and while Toblach transferred his impedimenta to a porter the prince drew a long breath and said to himself: "Life is wonderful; I am twenty-one and my sense of color is excellent and I am in Paris."

To a traveller arriving at night, Paris reveals a glamour and conceals a mystery: the excited, gesticulating porters that greet the train as though they were there to welcome friends and eager to serve them; the uncertain lights of the trainshed; the dinning in the ears of a strange language a beautiful strange language; and the wild, exhilarating flight in a trunkladen taxi through unknown streets.

There is glamour, if you will, in the lights of the restaurants, in the dizzy crowds, and in the broad, brazen avenues teeming with a race of people who like to believe that every day is a holiday; but there is mystery in the silent by-streets, lined with high blank walls and darkened windows, where a footstep echoes dismally and the beat of a horse's hoofs resounds like musketry; and there is mystery, too, in the stretches of fragrant gardens, with their tree-tops reaching up dark masses into the golden glow that hangs like a halo above the City of Lights.

Charles-Edward and Toblach were met by an attaché of the legation, and the custom-house had been warned that Charles-Edward, being a younger son of a king, had nothing to declare.

The attaché piloted them to their apartment in an automobile, with two men on the box. It was the last glimpse of luxury that Charles-Edward was to have. The two men on the box, with perfect dexter

ity, drove the car down the Avenue de l'Opéra, through the colonnade arches of the Louvre, and across the Pont des SaintsPères, straight into the Quarter. CharlesEdward leaned, breathless, from the window.

"The old river looks well to-night," remarked the attaché, for want of something better to say.

The old river, in truth, held all the lights and colors of the crown of the king of Kervia. Charles-Edward sighed. He knew he should never be great enough to paint it.

They twisted around to the Boulevard du Montparnasse, and finally struck to the right, up the Boulevard Raspail, almost as far out as the Lion de Belfort. They stopped in front of a four-story house, grim and dark save for feeble lights in the windows of the top floor.

"We are here, your Royal Highness," said the attaché.

"Hush," said Charles-Edward, his finger to his lips; "I am no longer a prince, I am a man."

The attaché bowed and said: "As you will, monsieur."

Then he gave a long pull at the bell, and the door clicked and swung open, disclosing utter blackness beyond. Toblach nervously lit a match. From a tiny room on the left came the sleepy voice of the concierge.

"Monsieur will find his candle on the table. Monsieur has the fourth floor."

And so Prince Charles-Edward, followed by Toblach and the attaché of the Kervian legation, lighted the candle and climbed the four flights of stairs. Toblach and the attaché, being uninspired and wholly sane, were out of breath at the top; but the young prince trod them as though they were golden steps to Paradise. Have not all great geniuses, since Saint Simeon Stylites, lived as high above the street as possible?

The attaché fitted a huge iron key to the lock, swung the door open and stood aside with a grand flourish to let the prince pass. "This is the apartment, monsieur," he said, as though he were ushering him into Buckingham Palace.

Two dim oil-lamps, added to the candle in Toblach's hand, flickered wanly on a suite of low-ceilinged rooms, done in the

style of the Empire-that unholy period when all of the civilized world was unanimously inartistic. But Charles-Edward saw not the imitation black marble mantel, nor the funereal hangings, nor the unpardonable gilt mirrors. He walked to one of the two tall French windows, opened it with some difficulty (for it was used to being hermetically sealed), and stepped out on an iron balcony overlooking the quiet street. From there he had a view of the chimney-pots and the stars; and, between them, hanging, swirling, swaying, like one giant search-light piercing through the mist, the glow of a million lights. The prince drew a long breath.

"I will bid you good-night, monsieur," said the attaché at his elbow; "you must be tired; you have come a long way from home."

"No," said the prince, his eyes fixed over the city, "I think I have come a long way to home."

III

CHARLES-EDWARD had been a student in Paris for almost a month before he met Rose-Marie.

"We each have two first names, have we not?" she remarked, with large eyes on him. "How funny!"

"Yes," he answered, "very. What shall we do about it?"

"I find it hard to think in this pose," she protested. "When you are ready to let me rest I will decide."

So, in her fluffy little scarlet balletskirt, poised on one foot, she remained as motionless as possible for twenty more minutes. Charles-Edward worked in silence. A glimpse of a Degas had inspired him to paint a young lady balancing herself with a long pole on a tight-rope, far up in the bright darkness above the footlights. For this a beautiful and patient model was necessary; and Rose-Marie was as patient as a beautiful model can be.

At the end of twenty minutes he sighed, took off his spectacles, squinted his eyes at his canvas and then at Rose-Marie.

"You may rest now," he said, and was so occupied scraping his palette that he did not turn until she fell to the floor, her face pathetically white in the midst of her scarlet dress.

"It is all right," she protested, as he bent over her. "My leg went to sleep, and when I tried to stand on it, it would not wake up."

"My dear child!" he exclaimed. "Will you rub it a little for me?" she asked him, as she might have asked him to pass the salt.

So Charles-Edward sat on the floor and rubbed the two red stockings with all of his royal strength.

"Only the left one-the one I was not standing on," said she.

"I beg your pardon," said Charles-Edward; "how thoughtless of me!" and he actually blushed.

When she was better he helped her to limp to his sofa, and he summoned Toblach to bring them tea and brioches.

Then said she: "I once knew an English artist called Charles, but he had no Edward at the end of it like you have. Every one called him Sharlay.'

"You mean," he suggested, "that every one called him Charlie?"

"Yes," said she, "that is it-Sharlay. Shall I call you Sharlay?"

"By all means," he answered, smiling. "I think it is a great improvement."

So she called him Sharlay, and she remained Rose-Marie, and thus they obviated the nuisance of two double names.

From that day they were fast friends, their intimacy enduring long after the painting of the scarlet lady walking a tight-rope had been completed, condemned, and destroyed. She pleaded in vain for its life; but Sharlay was obdurate where it concerned his art.

Rose-Marie necessarily lacked some of the graces and refinements of the ladies of King Frederick's court; but she lacked also all of their lazy immorality and their sophisticated boredom with life. There are some women who, essentially womanly, are superficially children. We have often heard of the child-woman-RoseMarie was the woman-child.

Sharlay, looking at her through his horn-rimmed spectacles, saw a slim little person, straight but pliant. She might have been sixteen; she might, almost, have been less; but she was twenty. As a private citizen she was apt to wear black, with touches of lace that was whiter even than her young neck, and considerably

whiter than her capable, brown hands. Professionally, as a model, she wore anything, but always something. And this was not because she was self-conscious or a prude or because God had shaped her imperfectly (he knows he had not), but because, as she put it, she knew she had a way of carrying her clothes. Une façon de porter ses costumes is no mean asset for a model.

She watched the world through large, wondering brown eyes, like a child watching a conjurer. To her every sunrise was a feat of white magic. Her thoughts must always have been pleasant, for even during her silences a smile hovered about her lips, teasing to be born.

One day she said: "I smile too much. I don't know why. Perhaps it is that later in life I shall have to cry a great deal."

"Not if I can prevent it," answered Sharlay firmly, rubbing some cobalt blue from the side of his nose. "I will have no red-eyed models, and I refuse to do a study of Niobe.

"You are a very droll man, Sharlay," she retorted, "especially when you are painting. You really have a kind heart. I know that, because I have seen you feeding the birds in the Tuileries. And you are good to Toblach, too. But when you are painting-oof-everything then is paint. Every woman is a model, then, and nothing else. You are selfish, Sharlay, when you paint."

"Yes, my dear," replied the prince absently. "Keep the shoulder more to the left.'

She made a harmless little face at him and obeyed.

"There," she said, "didn't I say so?"

At the end of ten minutes he allowed her to rest. She curled herself up on the sofa with a sigh, and smiled at him. Art for the moment put aside, he removed his spectacles and smiled back at her. He felt completely happy.

"Who are you?" she demanded after a while.

"Who am I?" repeated Sharlay, mystified.

"Yes," said she. "Tell me all about yourself. Who were your father and mother? What sort of a baby were you? Did you always squint up your eyes? Why

did you leave Kervia? Are you going to get married, or are you married already and, if so, where is she? You see I know nothing about you, and Toblach is always so very discreet, and except for your brother Joscelyn, whom I detest, scarcely any one else ever comes to see you. So begin, now, and talk to me about yourself. It always pleases a man to do that. Also, in this case, it will please me."

"Well, really," Sharlay began, "there is nothing to tell."

"Oh," said she, "there is nothing to tell! What, then, of the wonderful coat of arms that I see on your cigarette case with Multum in parvo, whatever that may mean, and two dogs on their hind legs?" "Those are not dogs," corrected the prince; "those are wolves."

"Wolves, then," said she. "What, then, of the wolves?"

"That is well, it is somebody's coat of arms, I suppose," he answered weakly. "Ah!" she said, hurt at his reticence; "I beg your pardon. I am very rude. I did not mean to be." And her mouth, for once, drooped pathetically, like that of a child who has been scolded.

Immediately Sharlay succumbed. His was a nature so sensitive itself that it could not endure to inflict distress. Men like him do not prosper.

"Poor little Rose-Marie," he said; "I have hurt your feelings now, haven't I? I have been a brute."

"How absurd!" she replied, trying to smile. "It was only that I thought we were better friends than-than you seem to think we are. And friends do not have mysterious chambers in their lives to which they withhold the keys-Bluebeard!"

She was serene once more; but, nevertheless, she rose and started to put on her hat, pulling her long pins from the upholstery of the sofa.

Forthwith he was determined to tell her all that she wanted to know; so he said: "Listen!" And she, being a woman, put her hatpins slowly back, one by one, into the sofa and sat down at his side.

IV

MEANWHILE the young Prince Joscelyn had been very busy. He was in Paris on what purported to be a month's vacation;

but since Joscelyn, aside from bowing graciously to the plaudits of enthusiastic Kervians as he galloped at the head of his well-dressed regiment on gala days, had no confining duties of state, there was a minority that winked shrewdly and said: "He is hatching something. Wait, and we shall see."

Joscelyn lived at the expense of Kervia in the royal suite of the Bristol, in the Place Vendôme. Occasionally his limousine found its way across the river to his brother's apartment; more often it was seen standing in front of the Kervian legation in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, for Joscelyn and Count Michael of Tretz, the minister, were as thick as thieves.

One raw February day, when every conscientious sybarite should have been at the Riviera, Joscelyn sat in the minister's study. The Count of Tretz, a smile of admiration on his thin, colorless lips, and a sleek hand playing with his pointed beard, sat opposite him and added him up. The world and his birth certificate knew that Joscelyn was twenty years of age. Tretz had but to close his eyes to imagine him forty.

"The trouble with you," said Joscelyn, "is that you always want to have a foot on each side of the fence."

"The trouble with you, prince," retorted Tretz coolly, "is that you are overimpatient. That, perhaps, is the only fault of youth that you possess."

Joscelyn bowed ironically. "I admit," he said, "that I am no dawdler-no temporizer."

"Quite so," said the minister. "But this is a case of love, I believe, and of marriage. It is well to walk softly when they are in the woods. They are shy, wild creatures and easily startled."

"Rot!" said Joscelyn emphatically. "I tell you that Charles-Edward is in love with her now. He would marry her to-morrow if it should happen to occur to him." The minister smiled.

"I don't imagine we shall be able to dispose of him as easily and as quickly as that. What we most desire, of course, is that he should marry this Rose-Marie person you have told me about, not at our suggestion but against our emphatic and earnest protest. It is only that way that we can force him to sign a renuncia

tion of his chances of succession to the throne. We must point out to him how calamitous such a marriage would be; we must urge him to give up the idea; we must plead, we must threaten, we must reason with him; and, at the same time, we must be sure that he will remain steadfastly deaf to our prayers and our threats and our arguments. Now, that is a state of affairs-nay more, a state of mindthat cannot be brought about in a week. I should advise you, prince, to extend your vacation." And the Count of Tretz put his hand to his lips to hide a smile. "Oh!" said Joscelyn grandly; "as to that, there will be no difficulty."

"I take it," suggested Tretz, "that, in your life, vocation and vacation are synonymous."

The prince drew himself up. "Aren't you getting just a bit impudent, Count of Tretz?" he said.

"I beg your pardon," replied the count. "We will talk of other things. You have heard of the proposed marriage for your brother, the crown prince?"

"No," said Joscelyn serenely; "have they got some one at last for poor old Diederick? I hope she isn't too awful. Who is the fortunate lady?"

"The fortunate lady," said Tretz, with amusement, "is the Princess Charlotte of Holbein-Schönberg."

"God save the crown prince!" said Joscelyn with feeling.

"You are pleased to be frank," commented the minister. "It is true that the Princess Charlotte is not physically beautiful. I am told, however, that she has a beautiful soul. Moreover, such an alliance brings power to Kervia; it insures us the good will of Germany.'

"Poor Diederick!" was all Prince Joscelyn vouchsafed to say. A moment later, however, he added: "By Heaven, you know, I think I should prefer CharlesEdward's Rose-Marie!"

The Count of Tretz surveyed him keenly. "No, prince," he said. "You would not envy Charles-Edward his Rose-Marie if you were crown prince."

"Ah!" said Joscelyn, "if ?” "Exactly," replied Tretz.

Joscelyn shifted his eyes uneasily, and when he spoke again he was gazing out of the narrow window into a colorless sky.

"There is a great gulf between me and the throne," he said.

"There are only three men," said Tretz, "and they are all mortal."

"My father enjoys excellent health," said Joscelyn.

"So do you," returned Tretz, "and you are three times as young."

"Diederick is not only young, but he is a capable man-a first-rate soldier." "Yes," said Tretz, "and soldiers do not wait to die in their beds."

"Charles-Edward is but a year older than I, and he has resigned from his regiment. He runs no risks."

"He runs the greatest risk in life-he is in love."

Joscelyn turned slowly, and this time he looked the minister fairly in the eyes.

"Am I to understand, then," he asked, "that you and those in your confidence will be behind me in anything I may do to get the crown on my head?"

"Ah," said Tretz, "I do not say that. Not quite. But I will go so far as to state that there is a party in Kervia that would view with disfavor the possibility of Charles-Edward becoming their king. He is an enigma that most of us cannot solve. He is termed an eccentric-he has nothing of royalty in his make-up, and Kervia can never forgive him his spectacles."

"To my mind," said Joscelyn, "he's completely mad. For that reason he should be easy to handle. Once get him married to some one far beneath his rank, for whom he has conceived the grand passion, and he will sign his renunciation of the throne as gayly as he would sign his marriage license. All lovers are facile. Tie him hand and foot, I say."

"Tie him hand and foot," agreed Tretz, "and then wait until the hand of Time puts an end to the other lives that are in your way."

"You talk like Lady Macbeth," said Joscelyn, with a shudder.

Nevertheless he left the ministry in great good humor.

V

CHARLES-EDWARD painted hard all winter, and it is to be supposed that he made progress, for, as Rose-Marie had