Then he remembered that he wanted to see his son Max, and talk to him about certain matters; and so, after a few more tentative touches to the back of his head to find if it was still ticking--which it was--he went into his study, and sending for one of his secretaries, got a message despatched. And only when he was well on in the routine of his afternoon's labors did he recollect that he had not lunched. That break in the regularity of his habits seemed almost an adventure; but as he did not now feel hungry he plodded on, for this was his day of the week for signing accumulated arrears of documents, and several hundreds awaited him. So for a couple of hours he worked as regularly and monotonously as a bank-clerk, and while he was signing the less important papers, and passing them to one of his secretaries to be blotted and sorted, another read out to him those of which he wished to learn the contents. This duty was generally performed by the Comptroller-General himself; but to-day he was missing, and the King, left to make his own selection, was rather startled to find what a number of really important documents had been left over for this day, devoted to what may be described as routine signatures. As a rule it was the Comptroller who, out of his long experience, selected those documents which must be read and, only after due consideration, signed. Now, by some accident, he had been prevented from attending, and here was a crowd of important documents, the terms of which the King had never heard. He began to wonder. At least ten or a dozen were strange to him: he ordered them to be set aside. And now very dimly, very gradually, he began to suspect his position, and to perceive that without watchfulness he might very easily become less a conscious instrument of Government than a mere mechanism. What if he had become that already? II And then it grew dusk. The King dismissed his secretaries, and without turning on the light sat and thought alone. The effervescence had all gone from his brain, melancholy ruled him; and as he sat ruminating upon the past and his own present position his mind became obsessed by all the historical characters who had preceded him in the exercise of those royal functions now grown so exiguous in his hands, who had sat and labored at Statecraft in that very room, some of them, perhaps, in the very chair in which he was now seated. They became almost present to his consciousness. How would they have behaved in the present situation? How would they have set to work to add luster to that supreme symbol which still crowned the constitutional edifice?