The packing began, the choice garments were one by one neatly folded.  A light tan overcoat hung in Ram-tah’s closet, back of the case.  Ram-tah was dragged forth and for the moment lay prone.  He was to be left in the locked closet until a more suitable housing could be provided, and Cassidy had been especially warned not to let the steam-heated apartment take fire.

He found the coat and returned to the half-packed trunk in the bedroom where he resumed his wonderful task, stopping at intervals for always futile efforts at realization of this mad impossibility.  It was all Ram-tah.  Nothing but that kingly manifestation of himself could have brought him up to the thing.  He dropped a choice new bit of haberdashery into the trunk and went for another look at It prone on the floor in that other room.

A long time he gazed down at the still face—­his own still face, the brow back of which he had once solved difficult problems of administration, the eyes through which he had once beheld the glories of his court, the lips that had kissed his long dead queen, smiled with rapture upon his first-born and uttered the words that had made men call him wise.  It was not strange—­not unbelievable.  It was sane and true.  He was still a king.

He reached down and laid a tender, a fraternal hand upon the brow.  The contact strengthened him, as always.  He could believe anything wise and good of himself.  He could be a true mate to that bewildering flapper, full of understanding kindness.  He saw little intimate moments of their life together, her perplexities over fumed oak and patent tubs and marketing for pure food; always her terrific earnestness.  Now and then he would laugh at that, but then she would laugh too; sometimes the flapper seemed to show, with an engaging little sense of shame, that she just perfectly knew how funny she was.

But she was staunch; she had perfectly well known the very first moment she saw him.  And she had never spoiled it all, like that other one in Chicago, by asking him if he was fond of Nature and Good Music and such things.  The flapper was capable but quiet.  With his hand still upon Ram-tah’s brow in that half-timid, strange caress, he was flooded with a sudden new gladness about the flapper.  She was dear, if you came right down to it.  And Ram-tah had brought her to him.  He erected himself to look down once more.  They knew, those two selves; understood each other and life.

It occurred to him for the first time that Ram-tah, too, must have liked dogs, must have been inexpressibly moved by the chained souls that were always trying to speak from their brown eyes.  He looked over to Nap, who fiercely battled with a sofa cushion, and was now disembowelling it through a rent in the cover.  He wondered what Ram-tah’s favourite dog had been like.

He went back to the bedroom to finish his packing.  Ram-tah could lie until the moment came to lock him again in the closet, to leave him once more in a seclusion to which he had long been accustomed.