“Who would say this was Mademoiselle de Ferrier!” observed the younger of the two men.  Both were past middle age.  The one whose queue showed the most gray took Eagle reproachfully by her hands; but the other stood laughing.

“My little daughter!”

“I did strike the English girl—­and I would do it again, father!”

“She would do it again, monsieur the marquis,” repeated the laugher.

“Were the children rude to you?”

“They mocked him, father.”  She pulled the boy from behind a grave-stone where he crouched unmoving as a rabbit, and showed him to her guardians.  “See how weak he is!  Regard him—­how he walks in a dream!  Look at his swollen wrists—­he cannot fight.  And if you wish to make these English respect you you have got to fight them!”

“Where is Ernestine?  She should not have left you alone.”

“Ernestine went to the shops to obey your orders, father.”

The boy’s dense inertia was undisturbed by what had so agonized the girl.  He stood in the English sunshine gazing stupidly at her guardians.

“Who is this boy, Eagle?” exclaimed the younger man.

“He does not talk.  He does not tell his name.”

The younger man seized the elder’s arm and whispered to him.

“No, Philippe, no!” the elder man answered.  But they both approached the boy with a deference which surprised Eagle, and examined his scarred eyebrow and his wrists.  Suddenly the marquis dropped upon his knees and stripped the stockings down those meager legs.  He kissed them, and the swollen ankles, sobbing like a woman.  The boy seemed unconscious of this homage.  Such exaggeration of her own tenderness made her ask,

“What ails my father, Cousin Philippe?”

Her Cousin Philippe glanced around the high walls and spoke cautiously.

“Who was the English girl at the head of your mob, Eagle?”

“Sally Blake.”

“What would Sally Blake do if she saw the little king of France and Navarre ride into the church lane, filling it with his retinue, and heard the royal salute of twenty-one guns fired for him?”

“She would be afraid of him.”

“But when he comes afoot, with that idiotic face, giving her such a good chance to bait him—­how can she resist baiting him?  Sally Blake is human.”

“Cousin Philippe, this is not our dauphin?  Our dauphin is dead!  Both my father and you told me he died in the Temple prison nearly two weeks ago!”

The Marquis de Ferrier replaced the boy’s stockings reverently, and rose, backing away from him.

“There is your king, Eagle,” the old courtier announced to his child.  “Louis XVII, the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, survives in this wreck.  How he escaped from prison we do not know.  Why he is here unrecognized in England, where his claim to the throne was duly acknowledged on the death of his father, we do not know.  But we who have often seen the royal child cannot fail to identify him; brutalized as he is by the past horrible year of his life.”