"The Founder--or ought I not rather to say the first Knight?--of the Order was (if the story be true) a certain ancestor of our royal house who had spent the greater part of his life in wars of unjust aggression. To atone for them--or for other things which weighed more heavily on his conscience--he went late in life on a crusade to the Holy Land; and after being there handsomely trounced by the infidel, was returning in dejection to the sea-coast with the mutinous remnant of his following, when the founding of the Order of the Thorn occurred to him. "It occurred to him thus: this at all events was his own account of it. He had become separated from his company of knights, darkness was coming on--when, as he spurred his tired steed with little mercy for its exhausted condition, he passed by the roadside a beggar who cried out to him for charity. But the charity asked for was not alms, but only the withdrawal from the mendicant's foot of a thorn which troubled him. "My ancestor, softened by some accent of gentleness or patience in the suppliant's voice, dismounted to do the service required of him, and in the growing darkness drew out the thorn. But when he had got it free from the flesh it seemed no more a thorn but an iron nail; and the wound out of which he had drawn it shone with celestial radiance. Then was founded the Order. The Mendicant bade him bind the Thorn upon his heel in the place of his spur, so that whenever thereafter he should be tempted to goad or oppress whether man or beast the Thorn should remind him of pity and mercy. I wait for your Grace's criticism of that legend?" The Archbishop made no reply: with a courteous gesture of the hand he invited the Prince to continue. "I hoped," said the young man, "to be instructed in the connection between that Founding and the continuance of the Order. You spoke of chivalry and loyalty; but the chivalry which you invited us to emulate was merely the physical daring of our ancestors as proved in war (wherein I am no longer allowed to take part); and the loyalty was to a form of monarchy which modern conditions now threaten with change. And I, looking at all my brother Knights around me, and at myself, wondered by what right we wore that iron thorn upon our heels. "Among us--I need not mention names--were men whose lives were far more notoriously evil than mine--men whose wealth had been gained for them by the grinding of sweated humanity; men who received enormous rents from houses not fit for human habitation--men who opposed every act of remedial legislation which disturbed their own vested interests, and who did these things with an untroubled conscience because the conditions they fought for were all the outcome of custom or of law. "And I remembered that some day I should be required to become their Grand Master--the titular head of that dead Order of Chivalry; and I wondered what would happen if I acted honestly upon my conscience and refused."