The new incumbent, who had brought to the Throne of Galavia all the libertine’s irresoluteness, paced the floor in perplexed distress.  He feared Jusseret.  He dared not anger or disobey him.  It appeared that being a King was not what he had conceived it, as he sat under the chestnut trees of the Paris boulevards and listened to the band.

When Jusseret had left him to his thoughts he paused three times with a tremulous finger on the call-bell, unable to command the courage required to send a message to the Countess Astaride.  Finally he succeeded and five minutes later stood shamefacedly in the presence of the woman who had made him King.  She was more than usually beautiful, and as always her beauty and personality dominated him, swayed his senses like music.  It was so easy to slip into the impetuous attitude of the lover; so difficult to maintain the austere one of the Monarch.

Delgado nerved himself and began.

How he said it or what he said, he did not himself know when the words had been spoken.  He rushed through the speech he had prepared like a frightened child at recitation and waited for the outburst of her anger.  He waited in vain.

Marie Astaride had plotted, had consented to every infamy which had been suggested as necessary to bring the man she loved to the Crown.

Now she was silent.

The man looked up when he had waited a seeming century for the expected torrent of reproach.

She was standing supporting herself upon her downward stretched arms, her hands resting on the table.  Her face was pallid and her magnificent figure rigid.  The scarlet fullness of her lips had gone bloodless.  Her eyes were stupefied.

At length she straightened herself, let go her support upon the table and went slowly like a sleep-walker from the room.  She had not spoken.  She had not said good-by, but Louis Delgado knew that she had walked out of his life.

* * * * *

That evening Monsieur Jusseret of the French Cabinet Noir met, as if by chance, young Lieutenant Lapas, who was now high in the favor of the new government.  Jusseret knew that the lure which had drawn young Lapas away from the confidence of Karyl to the uncertain standard of Delgado had been the influence of the Countess Astaride.  He knew that Lapas loved her hopelessly, willing even in her name to serve the greater man who loved her more successfully.  His attachment was that of the boy for the woman who is mistress of all the mature arts of charm.  This love could be turned into the fanatic’s zeal; this boy could be led to the extreme of martyrdom, if the strings of his characterless nature were played upon with a skill sufficiently consummate.  Jusseret knew also a number of other things.  He knew that whereas he had, to all seeming, brought a difficult task to completion, he was in reality not yet half through.  His own vision went farther into the future, and recognized in the present only a mile-post far from the ultimate.