"I did harm to none by my innocent deception," she pleaded. "I was very young when I married Alec's father, who was nearly twenty years older than I. We were not rich, and we were compelled to live in a rude mining camp, where my husband owned some claims that seemed to be of little value. But from the day of our wedding our fortunes began to improve, and, in the year before my son was born, money poured in on us. That small collection of wooden shanties has now become a great city. The land my husband owned is worth ten thousand times its original value; but, unfortunately, when wealth came, I grew dissatisfied with my surroundings. I wanted to travel, to mix in society, to become one of the fashionable throng that flocks to Paris and London and the Riviera in their seasons. My husband refused to desert the State in which his interests were bound up.
"We quarreled—it was all my fault—and then one day he was killed in a mine accident, and I, scarce knowing what I was doing, fled to New York for distraction from my grief and self condemnation. My son was born there, and in that same year I met Prince Michael Delgrado in a friend's house. To me in those days a Prince was a wonderful creature. He quickly saw that I was a prize worth capturing, and not many months elapsed before we were married. I had all the foolish vanity of a young woman, unused to the world, who was entitled to call herself a Princess, and it seemed to my flighty mind that the fact of my son bearing a different name to my own would always advertise my plebeian origin; for I was quite a woman of the people, the daughter of a storekeeper in Pueblo. I cast aside my old and tried acquaintances, placed my affairs in trustworthy hands, and, when we set up an establishment in Paris, my infant son came to be known as a Prince of the Delgrado family.
"Once such a blunder is made it is not easily rectified; but during many a sad hour have I regretted it, for Michael Delgrado did not scruple to use it as a threat whenever I resented his ill conduct. At first a trivial thing, in time it became a millstone round my neck. As Alec grew up, it became more and more difficult to announce that he was not Prince Alexis Delgrado, but a simple commoner, Alexander Talbot by name.
"There, then, you have the measure of my transgression. It was the knowledge of the truth that drove that dear girl, Joan Vernon, from Delgratz this evening, because General Stampoff would not scruple to reveal the imposture if he failed to secure the King's adherence to his projects."
"God's bones!" broke in Stampoff. "I made him King, though I was aware from the day of your wedding that he was not Michael's son. King he is, and King he will remain if he agrees to my terms."
"Go on with your story, mother," said Alec softly. "I think I am beginning to understand now."
"What more need I say?" wailed the Princess in a sudden access of grief. "I have squandered your love, Alec, I have ruined my own life, I have devoted all these wretched years to a man who is the worst sort of blackmailer,—a husband who trades on his wife's weakness."
She turned on Prince Michael with a last cry. "I am done with you now forever!" she sobbed. "I have borne with you for my son's sake; but now you and I must dwell apart, for my very soul loathes you!"
She sank into a chair in a passion of tears, and Alec bent over her. He spoke no word to her; but his hand rested gently around her neck while his eyes traveled from Michael's gray-green face to Julius Marulitch's white one.
"I think we have all heard sufficient of the Delgrado history to render unnecessary any further comment on my decision to relinquish an honor that, it would appear, I had no right to accept," he said. "I have gained my end, though by a strange path. Will you please leave me with my mother?"