The King looked a little deprecatingly at the sleeve of his leather jerkin. In lieu of the morose, thick-witted Will Jackson, he now stood forth a frank and jovial rogue enough. For all the disguise of his dirt and his rags, his kingship seemed suddenly to make him a gentleman. As a serving-man or a wandering vagabond he would still have been excellent; but granted his kingliness, he made no such very bad specimen of a monarch. The title shone forth in his swarthy looks, added a freedom to his manners, and a grace to his bearing, as, in the fashion of a simple commoner, he drank his sack and munched his nuncheon, and offered words of gallantry and comfort to his beautiful, distressed companion. But in the absence of the title, he would still have done very well for Will Jackson. As is the way with many another, the coat was the man. It required the label of King to make him one; but once affixed, it certainly suited him admirably. “Is my lord strong enough to receive me,” he asked the lady as he disposed of the last morsel of his bread and meat. “I pray that he may ever be strong enough to receive your Majesty,” said the lady, fervently. “May I conduct you to his chamber, Sire?” The King and the lady went together up the creaking old stairs. The landlord rubbed his hands across his bewildered eyes. He then sat down suddenly, or rather fell, into his chair at the side of the hearth. [Illustration: CHAPTER IX _The man in Bed_] When the king came softly into the chamber, the stricken man lay pale in his pillows, asleep. The sufferer, now that the grave crisis of his malady was past--it having come to its head on the night the bullet was taken from his body--looked fairer and more youthful than ever. He hardly appeared more than a boy. As he lay in his present unconsciousness, much of the petulance had gone out of his countenance; there was a tender and even sweet expression round his lips; and in many ways his face was far better to look upon than on the sad night of his arrival at the inn. “Harry,” said his wife, in an eager tone, “open your eyes and look at his Majesty; the King hath come to see you.” The sufferer, however, was too deeply asleep to be aroused by the soft tones of the woman. “Do not disturb him, I pray,” said Charles. “I would not do him the least disservice for the world, not even to the robbing him of five minutes of his precious sleep. We Stuarts owe too much to him and his ever to take wantonly from one of his name that which we can never give back again. His grandfather, his father, and himself, have they not given their all--their lands, their blood, nay, their lives--for our poor father’s cause and our own? I know not what fidelity it is in a family that they should from generation to generation, from father to son, lavish their possessions on unfortunate people who can never hope, in any adequate degree, to requite them.”