"No," she answered, meeting his look with perfect frankness, for she was speaking the truth; "I have never heard or seen the ballad."
"She was called Penelophon," said the King, with an embarrassed laugh.
Mlle de Tricotrin gave a genuine start of surprise. "Is your majesty serious?" she said.
"Perfectly."
"What a strange coincidence!"
Their conversation had been getting colder and colder. By some evil influence Kophetua seemed to be choosing the worst things he could say, and Mlle de Tricotrin replying with everything that was best calculated to annoy the King. It had reached at last to a painful iciness, and the embarrassment which now fell upon them both froze it altogether. They sat in silence, each knowing perfectly that the other was thinking something it would be a wide breach of manners to say, and that is almost worse than saying it.
Yet they need not have been so embarrassed, for, as it happened, it was no coincidence at all. The old tradition still grew green within the Liberties of St. Lazarus, and there were few families in which one of the women was not named Penelophon. Still the beggars kept so much to themselves that this very natural custom was not generally known, and certainly it had never come to the ears of the King or Mlle de Tricotrin. Hence their embarrassment was as great as if it had been well-founded, and was most happily relieved by the Count desiring to know if his majesty would take a dish of tea.
It was perhaps more than a coincidence which later in the evening caused Kophetua to ask M. de Tricotrin what he thought of the new American Republic. His interview with Mlle de Tricotrin seemed to put matrimony further from him than ever, and his abdication was staring him in the face. He began to see it was unavoidable, and his innate moral courage and conscientiousness made him cast about for a light in which the inevitable should appear a duty that he chose for himself to perform. More than ever he began to wonder whether his position were not a crime, and whether plain morality did not bid him resign and form a republic. The Marquis, with his revolutionary ideas, was naturally the man to help him along the road by which alone his moral escape could be made. He determined to lose no time in getting the help he expected, seeing that M. de Tricotrin, like all Frenchmen of fashion, was ready to express a passionate admiration of the American Constitution.
"As a republic," said the Marquis, in answer to the King, "if I may so far express myself in your majesty's presence,—as a republic, I look upon it as one of the sublimest emanations of the human brain."
"Pray do not apologise for your opinions," replied the King; "they are entirely in accord with my own. I myself regard a republic as an institution so divine that I am tempted to look upon a king as amongst the worst of criminals."