And yet he could not read the book without a certain evil quickening.  Brutal though his method of approach had been, the man had conquered more than mere force may ever conquer.  The Polish woman had come to love him; the little actress would have followed him to his lonely island.  Others, too many others, had confessed his power.

He was ashamed of such a past, yet read it with a guilty relish.  He recalled the flapper who had so boldly met his glance.  He thought she would have been less bold if she could have known the man she looked at.  He placed “Napoleon, Man and Lover” at the bottom of his trunk beside the scarlet cravat he had feared to wear.  It was not a book to “leave around.”

“The Hundred Days,” which he read the following night, was a much less discouraging work.  It told of defeat, but of how glorious a defeat!  The escape from Elba, the landing in France and the march to Paris, conquering, where he passed, by the sheer magnetism of his personality!  His spirit bounded as he read of this and of the frightened exit of that puny usurper before the mere rumour of his approach.  Then that audacious staking of all on a throw of the dice—­Waterloo and a deathless ignominy.  He heard the sob-choked voices of the Old Guard as they bade their leader farewell—­felt the despairing clasp of their hands!

Alone in his little room, high above the flaring night streets, the timid boy read of the Hundred Days, and thrilled to a fancied memory of them.  The breath that checked on his lips, the blood that ran faster in his veins at the recital, went to nourish a body that contained the essential part of that hero—­he was reading about himself!  He forgot his mean surroundings—­and the timidities of spirit that had brought him thus far through life almost with the feelings of a fugitive.

The Lords of Destiny had found him indeed untractable as the great Emperor, the world-figure, and, for his proudness of spirit, had decreed that he should affrightedly tread the earth again as Bunker Bean.  Everything pointed to it.  Even the golden bees of Napoleon!  Were there not three B’s in his own name?  The shameful truth is that he had been christened “Bunker Bunker Bean.”  His fond and foolish mother had thus ingenuously sought to placate the two old Uncle Bunkers; unsuccessfully, be it added, for each had affected to believe that he took second place in the name.  But the three B’s were there; did they not point psychically to the golden bees of the Corsican?  Indeed, an astrologist in Chicago had once told him, for a paltry half-dollar, that those B’s in his name were of a profoundly mystic significance.

Again, he was of distinguished French origin.  Over and over had his worried mother sought to impress this upon him.  The family was an old and noble one, fleeing from France, during a Huguenot persecution, to Protestant England where the true name “de Boncoeur” had been corrupted to “Bunker.”  At the time of his earliest dissatisfaction with the name he had even essayed writing it in the French manner—­“B. de Boncoeur Bien”—­supposing “Bien” to be approximate French for “Bean.”