“Fumed oak,” he suggested to the waster.

But the waster pushed one of the slender-stemmed glasses toward him.

“There’s the life-line, old top; cling to it!  Here’s a go!”

Bean drank.  The beverage was icy, but it warmed him to life.  The mere white of an egg mixed with a liquid of such perfect innocence that he recalled it from his soothing-syrup days.

“Have one with me,” he said in what he knew to be a faultless bar manner.

“Oh, I say old top,” the waster protested.

“One,” said Bean stubbornly.

The attendant was again busy.

“Better be careful,” warned the waster.  “Those things come to you and steal their hands into yours like little innocent children, but—­“.

They drank.  Bean felt himself bold for any situation.  He would carry the farce through if they insisted on it.  He no longer planned to elude the waster.  They were in the speeding car.

“Fumed eggs!” murmured Bean approvingly.

They were inside that desolated house, the door closed fatefully upon them.  The waster disappeared.  Bean heard the flapper’s voice calling cheerily to him from above stairs.  A footman disapprovingly ushered him to the midst of an immense drawing-room of most ponderous grandeur, and left him to perish.

He sat on the edge of a chair and tried to clear his mind about this enormity he was going to commit.  False pretenses!  Nothing less.  He was not a king at all.  He was Bunker Bean, a stenographer, whose father drove an express wagon, and whose grandmother had smoked a pipe.  He had never been anything more, nor ever would be.  And here he was ... pretending.

No wonder Julia had fussed!  She had seen through him.  How they would all scorn him if they knew what that scoundrelly Balthasar knew.  He’d made money, but he had no right to it.  He had made that under false pretenses, too, believing money would come naturally to a king.  Would they find him out at once, or not until it was too late?  He shudderingly recalled a crisis in the ceremony of marriage where some one is invited to make trouble, urged to come forward and say if there isn’t some reason why this man and this woman shouldn’t be married at all.  Could he live through that?  Suppose a policeman rushed in, crying, “I forbid the banns!  The man is an impostor!” He seemed to remember that banns were often forbidden in novels.  Then would he indeed be a thing for contemptuous laughter.

Yet, in spite of this dismal foreboding, he was presently conscious of an unusual sense of well-being.  It had been growing since they stopped for those eggs, in that fumed oak place.  What about the Corsican?  Better have been him than no one!  He would look at that tomb.  Then he would know.  He was rather clinging to the idea of the Corsican.  It gave him courage.  Still, if he could get out peacefully ...

He stepped lightly to the hall and was on the point of seizing his hat when the flapper called down to him.