"What ails my father, Cousin Philippe?"
Her Cousin Philippe glanced around the high walls and spoke cautiously.
"Who was the English girl at the head of your mob, Eagle?"
"Sally Blake."
"What would Sally Blake do if she saw the little king of France and Navarre ride into the church lane, filling it with his retinue, and heard the royal salute of twenty-one guns fired for him?"
"She would be afraid of him."
"But when he comes afoot, with that idiotic face, giving her such a good chance to bait him—how can she resist baiting him? Sally Blake is human."
"Cousin Philippe, this is not our dauphin? Our dauphin is dead! Both my father and you told me he died in the Temple prison nearly two weeks ago!"
The Marquis de Ferrier replaced the boy's stockings reverently, and rose, backing away from him.
"There is your king, Eagle," the old courtier announced to his child. "Louis XVII, the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, survives in this wreck. How he escaped from prison we do not know. Why he is here unrecognized in England, where his claim to the throne was duly acknowledged on the death of his father, we do not know. But we who have often seen the royal child cannot fail to identify him; brutalized as he is by the past horrible year of his life."