“I know!  I know!  Yet everybody might have been born a prince.  It is far more to be a man!”

“True enough, Boy! yet everybody might not have been born to your position.  Only you could have been given the heritage that is yours!  My Boy, yours is a mission, a responsibility, from the Creator of Life Himself.  Everybody can follow—­but only God’s chosen few can lead!  And you—­oh, Boy! yours is a birthright above that of all other princes—­if you only knew!”

The young prince looked wistfully upward into the eyes of the elder man.

“Tell me, Uncle Paul!  Dmitry always speaks of my birth with a reverence and awe quite out of proportion to its possible consequence—­poor old man.  And once even the Grand Duke Peter spoke of my ‘divine origin’ though he could not be coaxed or wheedled into committing his wise self any further.  Now you, yourself the most reserved and secretive of individuals when it pleases you to be so, have just been surprised into something of the same expression.  Do you wonder that I long to unravel the mystery that you are all so determined to keep from me?  I can learn nothing at home—­absolutely nothing!  They glorify my mother—­God bless her memory!  Everyone worships her!  But they never speak of you, and they are silent, too, about my father.  They simply won’t tell me a thing about him, so I don’t imagine that he could have been a very good king! Was he, Uncle Paul?  Did you know him?”

“I never knew the king, Boy!—­never even saw him!”

“But you must have heard—­”

“Nothing, Boy, that I can tell you—­absolutely nothing!”

Verdayne had risen again and was once more pacing back and forth under the trees, as was his wont when troubled with painful memories.

“But my mother—­you knew her!”

“Yes, yes—­I knew your mother!”

“Tell me about her!”

A dull, hopeless agony came into the eyes of the older man.  And so his Gethsemane had come to him again!  Every life has this garden to pass through—­some, alas! again and yet again!  And Paul Verdayne had thought that he had long since drained his cup of misery to the dregs.  He knew better now.

“Yes, I will tell you of your mother, Boy,” he said, and there was a strained, guarded note in his voice which his companion’s quick ear did not fail to catch.  “But you must be patient if you wish to hear what little there is, after all, that I can tell you.  You must remember, my Boy, that it is a long time since your mother—­died—­and men of my age sometimes—­forget!”

“I will remember,” the Boy said, gently.

But as he looked up into the face of his friend, something in his heart told him that Paul Verdayne did not forget!  And somehow the older man felt confident that the Boy knew, and was strangely comforted by the silent sympathy between them which both felt, but neither could express.

“Your mother, Boy, was the noblest and most beautiful woman that ever graced a throne.  Everyone who knew her must have said that!  You are very like her, Paul—­not in appearance, a mistake of Fate to be everlastingly deplored, but in spirit you are her living counterpart.  Ah! you have a great example to live up to, Boy, in attempting to follow her footsteps!  There was never a queen like her—­never!”