The consciousness of this was so strong in him that he wondered whether he had not tried to do so.  If he had he would have been arrested —­he knew that; and so he knew that he had not done it.  He knew that he imagined doing so because it would be so awful to have done it, and he imagined being in love with her because it would be so frantic.  At the same time he dramatized an event in which he died for her, and she became aware of his hopeless passion at the last moment, while the anarchist from whom he had saved her confessed that the bomb had been meant for her.  Perhaps it was a pistol.

He escaped from the valet as soon as he could, and went back to Scheveningen limp from this experience, but the queens were before him.  They had driven down to visit the studio of a famous Dutch painter there, and again the doom was on Boyne to press forward with the other spectators and wait for the queens to appear and get into their carriage.  The young Queen’s looks were stamped in Boyne’s consciousness, so that he saw her wherever he turned, like the sun when one has gazed at it.  He thought how that Trannel had said he ought to hand her into her carriage, and he shrank away for fear he should try to do so, but he could not leave the place till she had come out with the queen—­mother and driven off.  Then he went slowly and breathlessly into the hotel, feeling the Queen’s miniature in his pocket.  It made his heart stand still, and then bound forward.  He wondered again what he should do with it.  If he kept it, Lottie would be sure to find it, and he could not bring himself to the sacrilege of destroying it.  He thought he would walk out on the breakwater as far as he could and throw it into the sea, but when he got to the end of the mole he could not do so.  He decided that he would give it to Ellen to keep for him, and not let Lottie see it; or perhaps he might pretend he had bought it for her.  He could not do that, though, for it would not be true, and if he did he could not ask her to keep it from Lottie.

At dinner Mr. Trannel told him he ought to have been there to see the Queen; that she had asked especially for him, and wanted to know if they had not sent up her card to him.  Boyne meditated an apt answer through all the courses, but he had not thought of one when they had come to the ‘corbeille de fruits’, and he was forced to go to bed without having avenged himself.

In taking rooms for her family at the hotel, Lottie had arranged for her emancipation from the thraldom of rooming with Ellen.  She said that had gone on long enough; if she was grown up at all, she was grown up enough to have a room of her own, and her mother had yielded to reasoning which began and ended with this position.  She would have interfered so far as to put Lottie into the room next her, but Lottie said that if Boyne was the baby he ought to be next his mother; Ellen might come next him, but she was going to have the room that was furthest from