But history makes the growing of the Secret Party clear,—­though it seems almost to cease to be history, in spite of its efforts to be brief and speak only of dull facts, when it is forced to deal with the Bearing of the Sign by two mere boys, who, being blown as unremarked as any two grains of dust across Europe, lit the Lamp whose flame so flared up to the high heavens that as if from the earth itself there sprang forth Samavians by the thousands ready to feed it—­Iarovitch and Maranovitch swept aside forever and only Samavians remaining to cry aloud in ardent praise and worship of the God who had brought back to them their Lost Prince.  The battle-cry of his name had ended every battle.  Swords fell from hands because swords were not needed.  The Iarovitch fled in terror and dismay; the Maranovitch were nowhere to be found.  Between night and morning, as the newsboy had said, the standard of Ivor was raised and waved from palace and citadel alike.  From mountain, forest and plain, from city, village and town, its followers flocked to swear allegiance; broken and wounded legions staggered along the roads to join and kneel to it; women and children followed, weeping with joy and chanting songs of praise.  The Powers held out their scepters to the lately prostrate and ignored country.  Train-loads of food and supplies of all things needed began to cross the frontier; the aid of nations was bestowed.  Samavia, at peace to till its land, to raise its flocks, to mine its ores, would be able to pay all back.  Samavia in past centuries had been rich enough to make great loans, and had stored such harvests as warring countries had been glad to call upon.  The story of the crowning of the King had been the wildest of all—­the multitude of ecstatic people, famished, in rags, and many of them weak with wounds, kneeling at his feet, praying, as their one salvation and security, that he would go attended by them to their bombarded and broken cathedral, and at its high altar let the crown be placed upon his head, so that even those who perhaps must die of their past sufferings would at least have paid their poor homage to the King Ivor who would rule their children and bring back to Samavia her honor and her peace.

“Ivor!  Ivor!” they chanted like a prayer,—­“Ivor!  Ivor!” in their houses, by the roadside, in the streets.

“The story of the Coronation in the shattered Cathedral, whose roof had been torn to fragments by bombs,” said an important London paper, “reads like a legend of the Middle Ages.  But, upon the whole, there is in Samavia’s national character, something of the mediaeval, still.”

* * * * *

Lazarus, having bought and read in his top floor room every newspaper recording the details which had reached London, returned to report almost verbatim, standing erect before Marco, the eyes under his shaggy brows sometimes flaming with exultation, sometimes filled with a rush of tears.  He could not be made to sit down.  His whole big body seemed to have become rigid with magnificence.  Meeting Mrs. Beedle in the passage, he strode by her with an air so thunderous that she turned and scuttled back to her cellar kitchen, almost falling down the stone steps in her nervous terror.  In such a mood, he was not a person to face without something like awe.