Of a sudden he became aware that the throng was all about him again--faces, a wall of white, mowing faces such as he had seen in the clouds. There were hundreds there, each one somehow known to him, and all congregated without relation to the sequence of time. _Time?_--Merciful God! It had ceased to exist for him; and now in a moment he remembered. What could have driven him to seek Nanny on the eve of his own wedding? He had forgotten that. He was to be married, he was to give the people a Queen and a succession, and Nanny had long been made to disappear from the path to that tremendous end. Months ago had it been, or years and years? It was all one to him in the terror of his utter loneliness. These faces! If they could arise and crowd upon him so confusedly, so irrelatively, why not Nanny’s amongst them? He wanted her, and they were crushing forward to withhold, to intercept him. She was there within all the time, and they had taken this cruel means to blind him to the truth. They were moving, they were sweeping upon him like a rushing wind; with a cry he turned, and beat with frantic hands upon the closed door---- A quick step came down the corridor, and a formal, stiff-lipped gentleman paused beside the King. “What are you doing, sir?” he said. “You must please to control yourself.” His Majesty turned, clutching his hand above his wild eyes. He was not standing and sobbing, a young emotional prince, before Nanny’s house in the street off the old Market; he had not come from St. James’s Palace at all. He was standing in the dark corridor at Windsor Castle, beating with feeble fingers on the storm-thrashed casement--an old, old mad and weary man, age-long forgetting and forgotten by all the world. “You must not thump the window like that, sir,” said Willis, the cold-eyed doctor in attendance, “or you will cut your hands. What is it you need?” The tears dropped from the old King’s eyes. He shook his head, muttering and mumbling. “I was thinking,” he said, “I was thinking. I need very little--only a new suit of clothes. But they must be black--black, in memory of George the Third.” The Hero of Waterloo