"Of course I know," said he when he had responded to her message and she had anchored him with a tea-cup and disarmed him with a smile, "of course I know what you want to say to me. Every girl who has refused me has said it sooner or later. You are saying it later--much later--than they generally do, but it always comes. 'You have found a wife for me.'" "I have done much better than that," she answered, "I have found work for you." And she sketched the distress of the Hyacinths in Denmark and urged him to go to their assistance. "But, my dear Margaret," he remonstrated, "What can I do? You have always known that 'something is rotten in the state of Denmark,' and yet you have let these poor innocents stir it up. I have often thought that poor Shakespeare added that line after the first performance. I intend to write that hint to Furniss one of these days." "You will write it," said Margaret Masters, "with more conviction after you have seen _my_ Denmark." "Very well," said he, "I'll visit Elsinore to-night, but I insist upon a return ticket." "You will be begging for a season ticket," she laughed. "They have reduced me to such a condition that I don't know whether they are amusing me or breaking my heart. Tell me, come, which is it? Did you ever hear blank verse recited with tense and reverent earnestness and a Bowery accent?" "I never did," said he. * * * * * "Shakespeare was right," whispered Burgess to Miss Masters. "There is something rotten in Denmark. I've located it. It's the Prince." They were sitting together in a corner of the kindergarten room of the settlement: a large and spacious room all decked and bright with the paper and cardboard masterpieces of the babies who played and learned there in the mornings. Casts and pictures and green growing things added to its charm and the Lady Hyacinths so trim and neat and earnest did not detract from it. The sewing-machines and the cutting-table had been cast into corners and well in the glare of the electric light the President was exclaiming in a voice which would have disgraced an early phonograph, "Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt." It was not a dress rehearsal but the too solid Prince wore his hair low on his neck and a golden fillet bound his brows. Silent, he was noble. His walk as he came in at the end of a procession of court ladies and gentlemen was magnificent--slow, dejected, imperious, aloof. But Wittenberg had a great deal to answer for, if he had contracted his accent there. Gertrude, Queen of Denmark, was a Hyacinth who worked daily at hooks and buttonholes for an East Broadway tailor. On this night she wore none of her regalia save her crown and the King had done nothing at all to differentiate himself from Susie Lacov who officiated as waitress in a Jewish lunchroom.