"My dear, if that were true——"
"But it is true, papa! These women are trying to bring you their petition, and they are prevented. The ministers say that you have nothing to do with it; so they go to the ministers—they take their petition to the ministers, and ask them to bring it to you, so that you may give them an answer. Have any of them brought you the petition, papa?"
The King shook his head.
"You see, they do nothing! And so the women go again, and again, and again, taking their petition with them; and because they are trying to get to you—to say that their grievances shall be looked into, and something done about them—because of that they are being beaten and bruised in the streets; and when they won't turn back then they are arrested and sent to prison."
By this time Charlotte was weeping.
"They may be quite wrong," she cried, "foolish and impossible in their demands; they may have no grievances worth troubling about—though if so, why are they troubling as they do?—but they have the right, under the old law, for those grievances to be inquired into and considered and decided about. And Parliament won't do it; it is too busy about other things, grievances that aren't a bit more real, and about which people haven't been petitioning at all. But you, papa (if that petition came to you), would have the right to make them attend to it. And they know it; and that's why they won't let you hear anything about it."
The King's conscience was beginning to be troubled. He had no confidence either in the good sense or the uprightness of his ministers to fall back upon; and he saw that his daughter, though she knew so little about the merits of the case, was very much in earnest. She had caught his hand and was holding it; she kissed it, and he could feel the dropping of warm tears.
"Very well, my dear," he said, "very well; I promise that this shall be looked into."
"Oh, papa!" she cried joyfully. "It was partly for that—just a little, not all, of course—that I went to prison."
"Then you ought not to have been so foolish. Why could you not have come to me?"