Uncle Bond leant forward in his chair.
"Are you quite sure that the Duke did not contrive that you should come here, my boy?" he persisted.
A doubt was at once born in the King's mind. The Duke had offered no opposition whatever to his reckless excursion. The Duke had accepted his rebellion. The Duke had encouraged him to leave the palace—
"The Duke wanted me to go to Windsor, or to Sandringham, in the first place, I think. But—I daresay he was quite willing that I should come here," he muttered.
"In the circumstances, you could hardly have a quieter, a more unexpected, and so, a safer, retreat," Uncle Bond remarked.
Then he chuckled delightedly.
"My Carlyle quotation was even more apposite than I realized, my boy," he crowed. "It seems to me that you have done your best—to commit suicide! But your experience will be similar to that of Fritz the First, of Prussia. They will cut the rope. The Duke must be busy cutting the rope now—
"This strike will collapse, of course—quickly. It must have been an unexpected move; a last desperate throw by the foreign agitators who have failed to produce more serious trouble. Everybody, who is anybody, has known, for months, that there was trouble brewing. All sorts of wild rumours from the Continent have been current in the Clubs. But an attempt at armed rebellion was the common idea. It has been talked about so much that most people, I daresay, have ceased to take it too seriously. They will be surprised. But the Duke would not be surprised. Everything is proceeding in accordance with plan! Things have a way of proceeding in accordance with plan, with the Duke—
"What a story 'Cynthia' could make out of it all! 'The King Who Went on Strike!' A good title for the bookstalls! But the best stories can never be written—"
Leaning back in his chair as he spoke, the little man turned away from the luncheon table, and looked out through the open windows, on his left, at the sunlit wooded landscape, beyond the garden.