A light, night breeze from the west, blew softly across the palace roof, rustling the silken folds of the Royal Standard, as it hung limply against the fifty-foot flagstaff, immediately above the King's head. With the quick, subconscious instinct of the trained sailor, he looked up to see if the flag was in order. To be "a sailor, not a Prince" had been, for years, his publicly avowed ambition, an ambition which had only recently been thwarted. His interest in this, no doubt, trivial matter of a flag was typical of the lasting impression which his long and happy years of naval service had left upon his character. In most things, small and great, the Navy had taught him, the Navy had formed him. The flag was correct. The very knots in the rope left no loophole for criticism. The small, gilt Royal Crown, which normally surmounted the flagstaff had been removed. In its place a large crown of coloured, electric lamps had been erected, as a finishing touch to the palace illuminations. Above the lights of this crown, the pointed shaft of the lightning conductor, which ran up the flagstaff, protruded, clearly visible against the night sky. The lightning conductor had been left in position. A slow smile lit up the King's face, and something of his weariness fell from him, as he saw the pointed shaft of the lightning conductor. Here, at last, was reality, presented, paradoxically enough, in the form of an allegory, a symbol. The words of the old Duke of Northborough came back to the King. At the close of one of the earliest of the many, long, informal talks, in the course of which the old Duke had set himself to explain to the young and inexperienced Prince, who had been called, so unexpectedly, to the throne, a few of the more urgent problems of Government, the King had brought the veteran Prime Minister up on to the palace roof, to see the new roof garden, which was the only innovation he had made, so far, in the palace arrangements, an innovation due to his pleasant recollection of nights of shore leave spent in the roof gardens of New York, during his service with the Atlantic Fleet. The old Duke had admired the flowers, and approved the tubbed trees; then he had looked up at the flagstaff, where the Royal Standard had been flying in a noble breeze; the juxtaposition of the pointed shaft of the lightning conductor, and the Royal Crown, at the top of the flagstaff, had caught his eye; and he had called the King's attention to it, at once, with an arresting gesture. "It is an allegory, a symbol, sir," he had said, in his vivid, forceful way. "You wear the Crown. I am the lightning conductor. It will be my duty, and the honour of my life, when the storm breaks, to take the full shock of the lightning flash, so that the Crown may remain on your head, unshaken."