And as a visible embodiment to all this strain of calculation and suspense, small crowds could be seen standing constantly at the gates of the palace, waiting for bulletins and watching with a curious fascination the flag that so obstinately continued to float mast high. They watched it as a crowd watches for a similar sign outside the walls of a jail: not that they wanted it to fall--but still, if it had to, they dearly wished that they might be there to see. Thus, even in their griefs, did the sporting instincts of the Jingalese people rise to the surface and bring them a consolation which nothing else could afford. My readers will give me credit, I trust, for not having sought to impose on them that fear of impending doom, that apprehension of what the next hour might bring forth, on the strength of which the Jingalese press so sedulously ran its extra editions from day to day. I have never for a moment pretended that the King was going to die, seeing, on the contrary, that he was destined to make a complete recovery. But he was not to be quite the same man again--not at least that man whom we have seen in these pages bumping his way conscientiously through a period of constitutional crisis. For when the six Jingalese medicos came to put their heads together over him, they found in the back of his head a small dislodgment of bone, rather less than the size of a florin, and protruding almost an eighth of an inch from the surface of the skull. Great was their speculation as to how such a thing could have come about without their knowing it--for here, of course, was the root of the whole mischief. This fracture, brought about perhaps by some flying fragment of bomb, unnoticed in the excitement of the moment and afterwards ignored, had evidently been the cause of the brain-fever; and when a cause of this sort is discovered nothing is easier for medical science than to put it right again. And so, seeing that the bone was out of place, they put it back just where it ought to be, that is to say, where it had been. And as soon as that was done, and the right pressure once more restored to the King's brain, then his temperature went down, his delirium abated, and his mind, as it gradually came back to him, recovered the dull, safe, and retiring qualities which had belonged to it a year ago; and with its old constitutional balance restored to it, it became once more contented with its limitations and surroundings, and made a very quiet, happy, and peaceful convalescence. And though on his recovery the King still remembered the events of the past months they appeared to him rather in the light of a bad dream than as a slice of real life. The Prime Minister came to see him on the very first day when he was allowed to sit up and receive visitors, and they met without any sign of constraint or enmity. "Well, Mr. Prime Minister, how are things going?" inquired the King.