From the moment of the royal rising that early morn, the King had seemed of malevolent mind. The attendants in his private suite insisted that he had quit the royal bed from the right side. Yet he had seemed to assimilate perversity from his static shower, declaring the current hot when, in fact, it was cold as refrigeration could make it. In a passion he had unwound the small dynamo of a new costume considered by his chief tailor a creation; later had hurled his breakfast filectric-mignon at the first chef, asserting that it bore no resemblance, either in appearance or gastronomic satisfaction, to the beefsteaks of men. The inadequate light cast by his pet device, an imitation of Sol, had provoked a personally conducted investigation of the mammoth power plant in the lower badlands. Disregarding the affairs which awaited his personal direction, he had spent the noon hour tinkering at the mechanism of his sun, moon and flock of stars. At the General Assembly of Demons his ill-temper had gained momentum. After listening for a time in sneering impatience to suggestions offered as amendments to the general proposition of standardizing crime, he had hurled upon that august body a very cataclysm of political overthrow. One by one he had assailed the ministry, down to the most faded of those angel plotters cast out with him at The Fall. Announcing that he would run the nether world alone and unaided, he had dissolved the cabinet, assigning its members to labors futile as their protests. In view of his treatment of those who had served him so long and so infernally, what was in store for mere courtiers, sycophants of a few recent centuries? When he straightened in the throne-chair, each of the seven straightened with him. When, tilting his crown at an easier slant, he glanced speculatively about, all crowded back against the highly charged curtains and tried to look indifferent at the shock. His gaze settled upon the prime minister. “Sin, you aborigine, a word!” Old Original--so called because his visability, like the King’s own, never had dimmed--made obvious effort to assume the sang-froid of one who knows himself to be indispensable; sauntered to the steps; bent in an obeisance of elaborate mockery. “Future of the Universe, I await your will,” he remarked with nasal twang. Satan looked contemptuous of his handyman’s forced effrontery. “I know you do. You’ve taken to awaiting my will entirely too much for your own good. There was a time when you were full of vile ideas. But you’ve lost your ingenuity of late. Since when have you designed a sin-mask that would deceive the least suspicious of earthlings or invented a new form of torture with which to demonstrate our canons of damnation?” The aged demon, forced on the defensive, eyed the Master with reproach. “Æons agone there ceased to be anything new beneath the sun and I----”