Walking aimlessly as yet—­it was too early for tombs—­he came again to that hotel on the circle.  They were asleep in there.  Little they’d worried—­glad to be so easily rid of him.

Then he noticed at the circle’s centre a lofty column wrought in bronze with infinite small detail.  Surmounting that column was the figure of the Corsican.  An upstart who had prevailed!

He left the circle, lest he be apprehended by the Breedes.  Soon he was again in that vast avenue of the park-places where he had slept.  And now, far off on this splendid highway, he descried a mighty arch.  Sternly gray and beautiful it was.  And when, standing under it, he looked aloft to its mighty facade, its grandeur seemed threatening to him.  He knew what that arch was—­another monument imposed upon the city by the imperial assassin—­without royal lineage since the passing of Ram-tah.

“Some class to that upstart!” he muttered.  And if Napoleon had been no one, was it not probable that Bean had not been even Napoleon.  The Countess Casanova had doubtless deceived him, though perhaps unintentionally.  She had seemed a kind woman, he thought, but you couldn’t tell about her controls.

His mind was being washed in that wondrous sunlight.

He was himself an upstart.  No doubt about it.  But what of it?  Here were columns and arches to commemorate the most egregious of all upstarts.  Upstarts were men who believed in themselves.

He retraced his steps from the arch.

Curious thing that scoundrel Watkins had kept saying on the boat.  “As a man thinketh in his own heart, so is he.”  Must mean something.  What?

Far down that wide avenue he came to a bridge of striking magnificence, beset with golden sculpture.  He supposed it to be one more tribute to the sublime Corsican who had thought in his heart, and was.

He had the meaning of those words now.

He, Bunker Bean, had believed himself to be mean, insignificant.  And so he had been that.  Then he had come to believe himself a king, and straightway had he been kingly.  The Corsican, detecting the falsity of some Ram-tah, would have gone on believing in himself none the less.  It was all that mattered.  “As a man thinketh—­” If you came down to that, nobody needed a Ram-tah at all.

From the centre of the bridge he raised his eyes and there, far off, high above all those gray buildings, was the golden cross that he knew to surmount the tomb.  Sharply it glittered against the blue of the sky.

“Be upstart enough,” it seemed to say, “and all things are yours.  Believe yourself kingly, though your Ram-tah come from Hartford.”

He walked vigorously toward that cross.  It often eluded him as he puzzled a way through the winding gray-walled streets.  More than once he was forced to turn back, to make laborious circuits.  But never for long was the cross out of sight.

Constantly as he walked that new truth ran in his mind, molten, luminous.  Who knew of Ram-tah’s fictive origin, or even of Ram-tah at all?  No one but a witty scoundrel calling himself Balthasar.