Assuredly if the power of words is a wonderful thing, the power of personality is infinitely greater. Bernhardt had spoken with a certain ready eloquence, a certain skill of pleading in his client's cause; but another might have spoken with twice his skill and twice his oratory, and have failed completely. It was not that he followed the temper of the mob and adapted himself to their moods; rather, he made their moods for them, and used them to his own sweet will. When he reasoned they followed and were convinced, when he lashed they cringed, when he reproached they suffered agonies of shame; and at the end he raised their enthusiasm for the object of their late malice, with the ease of a consummate master of men, and his last question was met with a ringing cry of "Long live the American! Long live Gloria of Grimland!" The ex-priest's smile was more of a sneer than anything--so cheap did he hold his triumph over the flaccid minds of the shifty horde; but his eye wandered to the roof where Trafford stood, shovel in hand, cheering himself and his secretly-married wife. "We will escort you to your hotel," Bernhardt called out. "It is not necessary," replied the American. "Bernhardt the Magician has effected my metamorphosis--he has changed me from a fox to a lion." CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE THE "BOB" RUN In the far north of Grimland, seemingly secure in its snow-blocked passes and its improvised fortifications, the mountain town of Weissheim basked serenely in the unclouded sunshine of its exalted plateau. The life of the place went on, little affected outwardly by the rude shocks of a revolution that had unseated a dynasty at Weidenbruck, and incidentally horrified the sober-minded people of Europe. The railway was cut that connected Weissheim with the capital, and the telegraph wires were drooping, limp and useless, from their stark poles. The foreign contingent,--the English and American visitors of the "Pariserhof,"--pursued their life of unadulterated pleasure-seeking as thoroughly and unconcernedly as was their wont. Each morning found the curling rink well filled with knickerbockered mortals, bearing brooms, and hurling granite bowls over the perfect ice, and using weird expressions of Scottish origin tempered with Anglo-Saxon profanity. The snows of the hillsides were scarred with the double-tracked impressions of innumerable ski-runners, and the great toboggan run--the Kastel run--found its daily complement of votaries for its dangerous attractions. Each night the thermometer showed its zero frost, and each day the winter sun proclaimed its potency with no uncertain ray. Nature was as serenely unconscious of politics as the guests of the Pariserhof were of the series of fogs that was at that time choking the streets of London with obfuscating blackness. This winter, indeed, was singularly like other winters at this ideal resort of athletic and convalescent humanity. It is true that horrible tales of rioting and