The fervid declamation of Johnny Kent must have echoed through the apartments. It sufficed to attract the notice of an erect, elderly gentleman in another room who opened a door and stared curiously at the strenuous tableau. At sight of the kindly, refined face with the snowy mustache and imperial, O’Shea gleefully shouted: “The king, God bless him! So this bright young minister of finance was a liar as well as a thief!” Comically abashed, Johnny Kent mumbled an apology for making such an uproar, at which the elderly gentleman bowed acknowledgment and said to the perturbed and rumpled Strothers: “My dear baron, will you be good enough to explain?” “These ruffians insisted on seeing you, Your Majesty, and when I tried to discover their business they called me names and assaulted me,” sputtered the young man in a heat of virtuous indignation. “He was afraid of the truth,” cried O’Shea. “We came to tell Your Majesty that he has cooked up a job to cheat ye out of six thousand pounds, and we can prove it up to the hilt. We caught him with the goods.” “That sounds a whole lot better to me than diplomacy,” approvingly exclaimed Johnny Kent. Bewildered by the vehemence of these outspoken visitors, King Osmond I of Trinadaro turned to the sullen minister of finance and inquired, still with his placid kindliness of manner: “These men do not look like ruffians, my dear baron. What are their names, and who are they? And what is the meaning of this grave charge they bring against your integrity?” “I am O’Shea, shipmaster, hailing from the port of New York,” spoke up the one. “I am Johnny Kent, chief engineer to Captain Mike O’Shea,” said the other, “and I hail from the State o’ Maine. And we can show you our papers. _We_ didn’t lose ’em in the Bay of Biscay.” Strothers stood biting his nails and shifting from one foot to the other, for once stripped of his adroit, plausible demeanor, nor could he find, on the spur of the moment, the right word to say. The royal personage said it for him. “I think you had better retire. I wish to hear what Captain O’Shea and Mr. Kent may have to tell me.” The amiable monarch was unconsciously swayed by the virile personality of Captain O’Shea, who dominated the scene as though he were on the deck of his own ship. Baron Frederick Martin Strothers made a last attempt to protest, but Johnny Kent glared at him so wickedly and O’Shea moved a step nearer with so icy a glint in his gray eye that there was a moment later a vanished minister of finance. The etiquette of courts troubled O’Shea not in the least as he cheerily yet respectfully suggested to the perplexed elderly gentleman: “Now, King Osmond, if you will please sit down and let us talk things over with ye as man to man, we’ll tell you how it happened.”