The Duke smiled grimly.
"Where will you remove the Court, sir?" he asked. "To Windsor? Or to Sandringham?"
The King began to drum, impatiently, with his fingers, on the window pane.
The Duke's pointed impenetrability, his persistence, irritated him, at the moment, almost beyond his endurance.
Of course he would have to do as the Duke wished. The Duke was the lightning conductor. He would have to fall in with the Duke's suggestions. His suggestions? His orders! And yet—
Windsor? Sandringham?
Windsor and Sandringham were merely alternative cells in the same intolerable prison house!
Perhaps it was the blithe whistling of the thrush perched on the tree near the windows; perhaps it was the sunlit peace of the palace garden—whatever the cause, the King thought, suddenly, and irrelevantly, of Paradise.
And then the irrelevance of his thought disappeared.
A man was talking beside him.