The fantastic idea caught the King's fevered fancy. It was in tune with the bitter, wilful, rebellious mood which had swept over him. He could not resist the temptation of giving it ironic expression. "It seems to me, if there is one man, in the whole country, who would be justified in striking, in leaving his work, I am that man!" he exclaimed. "I never wanted, I never expected to have to fill--my present command. To be 'a sailor, not a Prince,' was always my idea. Do people, do these people, who are coming out on strike, and hope to run up the Red Flag, imagine that I get any pleasure, that I get anything but weariness, out of--my place in the procession? If I followed my own wishes now--I should strike, too! I should be the reddest revolutionary of them all. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity is their war cry, isn't it? Those are the very things I want!" The Duke smiled grimly. "Where will you remove the Court, sir?" he asked. "To Windsor? Or to Sandringham?" The King began to drum, impatiently, with his fingers, on the window pane. The Duke's pointed impenetrability, his persistence, irritated him, at the moment, almost beyond his endurance. Of course he would have to do as the Duke wished. The Duke was the lightning conductor. He would have to fall in with the Duke's suggestions. His suggestions? His orders! And yet-- Windsor? Sandringham? Windsor and Sandringham were merely alternative cells in the same intolerable prison house! Perhaps it was the blithe whistling of the thrush perched on the tree near the windows; perhaps it was the sunlit peace of the palace garden--whatever the cause, the King thought, suddenly, and irrelevantly, of Paradise. And then the irrelevance of his thought disappeared. A man was talking beside him. It was not the Duke. It was Uncle Bond. "Whether you fight for your place or not, whether you come out at the head, or the tail, of the procession, wherever the head and the tail may be, whether you step to one side, or fall out altogether, whatever happens to you, my boy, Judith and I, will always be glad to welcome you to the inn at the corner, and give you a seat at our window. You will remember that!" A thrill of exultation ran through the King. Here, surely, was an opening, an opportunity, for the self-assertion, the self-expression, which he so ardently desired! Where should he go, now that the time had come for him to step out of the procession, but into Paradise, to Judith and to Uncle Bond, to stand beside them, at their window, in the old inn, at the corner of the market-place, the old inn, on the signboard of which was written in letters of gold "Content"? If he must seek a rural retreat, an asylum, a city of refuge, what better retreat could he have than Judith's and Uncle Bond's oasis, in Paradise, where no strangers ever came? In this matter, at any rate, he could assert himself. In this matter, at any rate, he would have his own way.