A Dash for a Throne

Illustrated by D. Murray Smith
NEW AMSTERDAM BOOK COMPANY, NEW YORK HUTCHINSON & CO., LONDON 1899
Copyright, 1899, by New Amsterdam Book Company

To a man who has been dead nearly five years everything would be forgiven, probably—except his resurrection.
This half-cynical thought was suggested by the extraordinary change which a few hours of one memorable July day had wrought in my circumstances and position.
As the thought occurred to me I was standing in the library of Gramberg Castle, my hands plunged deep in my pockets, deliberately dallying with my fate, as I watched the black dress of the Prince's beautiful daughter moving slowly among the gayly colored flower-beds in the warm sunshine, like a soothing shadow in the brilliant glare.
I was face to face with a temptation which I found infinitely alluring and immeasurably difficult to resist.
For five years I had been enduring an existence of monotonous emptiness, that depressed me till my heart ached and my spirit wearied; and now a chance of change had been thrust upon me, all against my seeking, at which my pulses were beating high with the bound of hope, my blood running once again with the old quick tingling of excitement, and, through the reopened portals of a life akin to that from which I had been thrust, desire, ambition, pleasure, hazard, were all beckoning to me with fascinating invitation.
I turned from the window and threw myself into a deep easy-chair to think.
Five years before I had passed in a moment from a position of Royal favor, with limitless ambition and opportunities, to one where death was avowedly the only alternate.
And no one had recognized this more readily than I myself.