"Determined to do what?"
"To serve out her sentence."
The King sat and thought for a while. He knew his Charlotte better than the police did; and, besides that, during the past week he had quite made up his mind that the Prefect of Police was in some matters a blunderer. "I wonder how he tried to get her out," he meditated aloud. "Did she send me any message?"
"Nothing direct, sir, that I know of; but I take it that her ultimatum was also directed against any possible action on the part of your Majesty. She was quite determined to do her full time; said indeed that you had promised her a fortnight. What that may mean, I do not know."
"Oh, really!" cried the King, "the folly of the official mind is past all believing,—especially when it concentrates itself in the police force! Let somebody go to that poor child and tell her that her father and mother have had a bomb thrown at them, and are trying to recover themselves in the grief caused by her absence! And then unchain her (you keep them in chains, I suppose?), open the door of her prison, and see how she'll run! And tell the Prefect," he added, "that I cannot present him with my compliments."
The King was quite right. In case Charlotte should refuse to believe the official word, she was shown a newspaper with lurid illustrations; and within an hour's time she was back at the palace, weeping, holding her father and mother alternately in her arms, and scolding them for all the world as though they had been guilty of outrageous behavior, and not she.
And, after all, it was a very good way of getting over the preliminaries of a rather awkward meeting.
IV
But when the first transports of joy at that reunion were over, they had to settle down to naughty facts and talk with serious disapproval to Charlotte of her past doings. And as they did so, though she still wept a little, the Princess observed with secret satisfaction that she had at any rate cured her mother of one thing—of knitting, namely, while a daughter's fate was being dangled in the parental balance.
From that day on when Charlotte showed that she was really in earnest the Queen put down her knitting; and those who have lived under certain domestic conditions where tyranny is always, as though by divine right, benevolent, wise, self-confident, and self-satisfied to the verge of conceit, will recognize that this in itself was no inconsiderable triumph.