Diggs spoke in timid accents:
"The regent destroyed it."
"Yes, yes, but before my death I anticipated his treachery. I left ten mimeographed copies where they could be found by the people. If they have not been found my death would have been vain. I waited to be sure. I've come to ask."
"They were found all right," his wife cried, angrily. "And if Wolf finds you now——"
She had scarcely spoken when an officer of the secret service suddenly laid his hand on the Bard's shoulder and quietly said:
"Come. We'll give you something to sing about now worth while!"
His wife clung to the tottering, terror-stricken figure for a moment and burst in tears. His friends shrank back in silence.
The regent had him flogged unmercifully; and Roland Adair, the Bard of Ramcat, ceased to sing. He became a mere cog in the wheel of things which moved on with swift certainty to its appointed end.
The social system worked now with deadly precision and ceaseless regularity. No citizen dared to speak against the man in authority over him or complain to the regent, for they were his trusted henchmen. Men and women huddled in groups and asked in whispers the news.
Disarmed and at the mercy of his brutal guard, cut off from the world as effectually as if they lived on another planet, despair began to sicken the strongest hearts, and suicide to be more common than in the darkest days of panic and hunger in the old world.