"They may be quite wrong," she cried, "foolish and impossible in their demands; they may have no grievances worth troubling about--though if so, why are they troubling as they do?--but they have the right, under the old law, for those grievances to be inquired into and considered and decided about. And Parliament won't do it; it is too busy about other things, grievances that aren't a bit more real, and about which people haven't been petitioning at all. But you, papa (if that petition came to you), would have the right to make them attend to it. And they know it; and that's why they won't let you hear anything about it." The King's conscience was beginning to be troubled. He had no confidence either in the good sense or the uprightness of his ministers to fall back upon; and he saw that his daughter, though she knew so little about the merits of the case, was very much in earnest. She had caught his hand and was holding it; she kissed it, and he could feel the dropping of warm tears. "Very well, my dear," he said, "very well; I promise that this shall be looked into." "Oh, papa!" she cried joyfully. "It was partly for that--just a little, not all, of course--that I went to prison." "Then you ought not to have been so foolish. Why could you not have come to me?" "I don't think you would have attended; not so much as you do now." And the King had to admit how, perhaps, that was true. "Well, my dear," he said again, "I promise that it shall be seen to. No, I shan't forget." And then she kissed him and thanked him, and went away comforted. And when he was alone he got down the index volume of Professor Teller's _Constitutional History_, and after some search under the heading of "Petitions" found indeed that Charlotte was right, and that the power to send messages to Parliament for the remedying of abuses was still his own. CHAPTER XVII THE INCREDIBLE THING HAPPENS I Since the break-up of his plans the King had been finding consolation in his son's book, an advance copy of which had reached him while Max was still abroad. Consolation is, perhaps, hardly the right word; it had distracted him in more ways than one; partly, and in a good sense, from his own personal depression over things gone wrong, but more with a scared apprehension of the terrible hubbub that would arise when its contents became known. The title, _Government and the Governed_, was sober enough, and the post-diluvian motto once threatened by Max had been omitted; but the contents were of a highly revolutionary character, and the bland "take-or-leave me" attitude of the author toward the public he would some day be called upon to rule was on a par with that statement of her prison doings which Charlotte was preparing for the delectation of Hans Fritz Otto, Prince of Schnapps-Wasser. In neither case did it seem likely that such a confession would draw parties together.