His Majesty said no more, but his eyes, hollow and tragic, continued to con the stranger. He seemed to him to have arisen, like a sudden cloud, huge and menacing, against the dim horizon of his hopes. That had not ceased to glimmer faintly, to his mind’s strained vision, through all the gloom of this long bitter night. A haunting sense of unreality pursued and half stupefied him. He felt like one in an enchanted wood, always sighting deliverance and always mistaken, yet drawn on by perpetual expectation. There had been something fantastic and illusory in this rapid vanishing of a kingdom; it seemed even now a myth, a jest. He would wake presently and laugh over the strangeness of that very vivid dream. It had been the oddest experience to feel State, authority, service, friendship, a throne, a people, all suddenly slipping from him, as if the bottom, in one unexpected moment, had come out of his universe; to feel himself, when in a condition of normal security, all at once, as in a nightmare, standing exposed and reviled, an alien not only in his own Court, but in his own country. The thing seemed too preposterous for belief, like the fantasy of a dead man witnessing in substance his own funeral, and he existed and moved in the constant expectation of the strange cloud’s dispelling. These shadows of the few faithful who remained to him would explain themselves and their insignificance; the flight by icy starlight would merge itself into the confused flow of a dream; the very curdling of the water would become the ropy web of moisture over sleeping eyeballs. Steadily he had kept his vision concentrated on that line of dawn which was to end the long delusion, and when the new shape rose to block it he felt suddenly as if his hope were overcast, and he awake at length to full consciousness of the truth. From that moment, for some unknown reason, he despaired. The boat was sped on its course by muscular arms. The regular pump of the oars, churning up liquid gold, the flight of house and palace, vast hilly hulks of shadow that fled behind them into vaster glooms, the silence and the stress seemed to hypnotise the party, so that none spoke or moved. But the eyes of the King, fixed and haggard, never left the face of the nearest oarsman. Even when, with a dive and rush, they shot into the stream that thundered under London Bridge, his gaze did not falter or withdraw itself for a moment. But presently, when they hove into the weltering shadow of the Tower, as if in an uncontrollable impulse he leaned forward, and, touching the stranger on the knee, spoke: “You guess what destinies you carry, my friend?” Sir Edward Hales started and put out an expostulatory hand; but the great thing, never ceasing in his labours, only mowed and nodded. “Aye,” he said, “I knew you from the first, James Stuart.” The King sat back, stiff and motionless. “No traitor?” he demanded rigidly. The man gave a short laugh.