The King walked a little restlessly up and down the dais. "It is hard," he said, biting his lips, "to assent to a view so desperate--so responsible...." As he spoke, the door of the audience chamber fell ajar, and through the aperture came, like the sudden chatter of a bird, the high, nasal, but well-bred voice of Barker. "I said to him quite plainly--the public interests--" Auberon turned on Wayne with violence. "What the devil is all this? What am I saying? What are you saying? Have you hypnotised me? Curse your uncanny blue eyes! Let me go. Give me back my sense of humour. Give it me back--give it me back, I say!" "I solemnly assure you," said Wayne, uneasily, with a gesture, as if feeling all over himself, "that I haven't got it." The King fell back in his chair, and went into a roar of Rabelaisian laughter. "I don't think you have," he cried. BOOK III CHAPTER I--_The Mental Condition of Adam Wayne_ A little while after the King's accession a small book of poems appeared, called "Hymns on the Hill." They were not good poems, nor was the book successful, but it attracted a certain amount of attention from one particular school of critics. The King himself, who was a member of the school, reviewed it in his capacity of literary critic to "Straight from the Stables," a sporting journal. They were known as the Hammock School, because it had been calculated malignantly by an enemy that no less than thirteen of their delicate criticisms had begun with the words, "I read this book in a hammock: half asleep in the sleepy sunlight, I ..."; after that there were important differences. Under these conditions they liked everything, but especially everything silly. "Next to authentic goodness in a book," they said--"next to authentic goodness in a book (and that, alas! we never find) we desire a rich badness." Thus it happened that their praise (as indicating the presence of a rich badness) was not universally sought after, and authors became a little disquieted when they found the eye of the Hammock School fixed upon them with peculiar favour.