The blue uniformed nurse bent down over the bed, and spoke in the Prince's ear.
The Prince opened his eyes, saw him, recognized him, and smiled.
"They tell me that I have got 'the route' Alfred," he whispered painfully. "I am not afraid to die. But I would live if I could. I know, no one knows as I know, what this will mean to you. They tell me I mustn't talk. I can't talk.
"The Duke is your man. Trust the Duke! He will not fail you. He will be your sheet anchor. With the Duke to steady the ship, you will ride out the storm."
An hour later, the Prince lay dead.
The King flung up his head.
The Duke had not failed him.
Many men had mourned the Prince's death, but no man had mourned it, as had the veteran Prime Minister. Between the Duke and the Prince, it was notorious, there had been a friendship, a constant association, personal and political, closer than that between many a father and son. Politically, the Prince's death must have been a staggering blow to the Duke. And yet the wonderful old man had never faltered. Early and late, he had laboured, with inexhaustible patience, at times with a surprising freedom, and yet always with a tact which made his freedom possible, to place his unrivalled knowledge, and his ripe wisdom, untouched by party spirit, at the service of a new, a young, and an inexperienced King.
The King was not ungrateful.
Still leaning wearily as he was against the roof balustrade, he turned now, as he thought of the old Duke, and looked across the shadowed darkness of St. James's Park, at the golden glare thrown up by the illuminations in Whitehall. There, in the silent, rather comfortless, and closed in house, in Downing Street, where he had lived, with hardly a break, for so many years, his father's minister, his brother's friend, the old Duke, even now, as likely as not, was hard at work, indomitable, tireless, resourceful, sparing neither himself, nor his subordinates, so that he, the King, "a sailor, not a Prince," might reign.