The King took the plate of chicken which the little man held out to him, and helped himself to salad, mechanically. This commonplace routine of the meal served to steady him. In some measure reassured by Uncle Bond's whimsical symbolism, he was relieved to find that he could eat.
Uncle Bond helped himself from the salad bowl in turn, tried the wine, and then settled down, happily, to the meal, which he had been so unwilling to essay alone. But the play of his knife and fork, energetic as it was, did not interfere, for long, with his talk.
"And now to resume our comedy!" he chuckled, in a minute or two. "Between ourselves, my boy, I am enjoying the present situation enormously. But 'Chorus' explanations are necessary, and cannot wait. Therefore— 'Enter Chorus!'
"I have known who you were almost, if not quite, from the first, Alfred. Judith knew you first, of course. Judith recognized you at sight. My dear boy, how could you imagine that it could be otherwise? Have you ever considered the possibilities of the case?
"Judith was born in the Navy. For years she lived in the Navy. She married into the Navy. Of course, she knew 'Our Sailor Prince.' As likely as not his photograph has adorned her mantelpiece ever since the far-away days when she was a romantic schoolgirl. 'Cynthia's' romantic schoolgirls, at any rate, are always like that!
"And I myself? Am I not a member of many clubs? 'Alfred York' was hardly likely to be an impenetrable incognito with me, was it? Wherever you go, too, although you are so strangely unconscious of the fact, you carry about with you a historic face!
"But, even if Judith and I had had no special knowledge, even if we had been lacking in penetration, it seems to me that we must, infallibly, have recognized you, sooner or later. Have you not been, in recent months at least, the most bephotographed young man in Europe? I do not suggest that the picture papers are Judith's, or my, favourite reading. But we have a cook. Do you think that we could keep a cook, who can cook, here, in the country, if we did not supply her with her daily copy of the 'Looking-Glass'? Sooner or later, it seems to me, Judith or I must have taken a surreptitious peep into the kitchen copy of the 'Looking-Glass,' and so seen, and recognized, our friend Alfred in the pictured news of the day."
At this point, the turmoil within the King, surprise, bewilderment, and self-contempt, the latter predominating, became altogether too much for him. He quite forgot the necessary silence of the stage super.
"I feel a most unmitigated fool, Uncle Bond," he exclaimed.
"Exit, Chorus!" Uncle Bond chuckled delightedly. "Slow music— Enter the Hero of the Piece! You were about to say?"