“Call this being king?” said Caerleon, when he and Cyril met at dinner in the comparatively small room which they had chosen out of the wilderness of state apartments as their dining-room when by themselves, for there were few regular court officials at present. The chief functionaries had all gone into exile with the late king, and it had not been possible to appoint their successors as yet, so that matters were in the hands of such of the less important officials as had adopted the cause of the revolution. These had not yet acquired the reverential obtuseness which would have enabled those whose places they had taken to maintain their position about the king as long as etiquette required, in spite of his disinclination for their society. Accordingly they effaced themselves obediently when their sovereign intimated that their attendance was not further desired that night, and it did not strike Caerleon that even the freedom he now enjoyed would have been impossible in a properly constituted court. “I call it being a slave, no less,” he went on. “What a luxurious beast old Franza must have been! I never saw anything like the rooms up-stairs. Well, if luxury could compensate him for all the bother and fuss, he deserved it.” “‘Uneasy lies the head----’” began Cyril. “Oh, shut up, and don’t quote moral platitudes,” said Caerleon, wearily. “I tell you what, Cyril, there are two things we’ll do. We’ll look out some attic place where we can smoke in peace, with two chairs in it and a rug on the floor, and we will break through that absurd rule of never going out without an escort. I mean to do the Haroun-al-Raschid business, and poke about a little _incog_.” “All right,” said Cyril; “I’ll be Grand Vizier. We will get hold of a couple of fur caps and these Thracian cloaks with high fur collars, and have some fun. Shall we begin to-night with the illuminations, or are you fagged out?” “I don’t see why we shouldn’t,” said Caerleon. “Root out some cloaks, will you? There are servants enough, and it’s a charity to give them something to do. It’ll be all right if we are in by eleven o’clock, when some of those chaps from the town are coming to serenade us.”