One Day | Page 8

be perfectly happy anywhere if the
young fellow were out of his sight.
He had made himself very much distinguished, had this Paul Verdayne.
He had found out how to get the most out of his life and accomplish the
utmost good for himself and his England with the natural endowments
of his energetic and ambitious personality. He had become a famous
orator, a noted statesman, a man of brain as well as brawn. People were
glad to listen when he talked. He inspired them with the idea--so nearly
extinct in this day and age of the world--that life after all was very
much worth the living. He stirred languid pulses with a dormant
enthusiasm. He roused torpid brains to thought. He had ideas and had
also a way of making other people share those ideas. England was

proud of Paul Verdayne, as she had good reason to be. And he was only
forty-three years old even now. What might he not accomplish in the
future for the land to which he devoted all his talents, his tireless,
well-directed activities?
He had given himself up so thoroughly to political interests that he had
not taken time to marry. This was a great disappointment to his mother,
Lady Henrietta, who had set her heart upon welcoming a
daughter-in-law and a houseful of merry, romping grandchildren before
the sun of her life had gone down forever. It was also a secret source of
disappointment to certain younger feminine hearts as well, who in the
days of his youth, and even in the ripeness of later years, had regarded
Paul Verdayne with eyes that found him good to look upon. But the
young politician had never been a woman's man. He was chivalrous, of
course, as all well-bred Englishmen are, but he kept himself as aloof
from all society as politeness would permit, and the attack of the most
skillfully aimed glances fell harmless, even unheeded, upon his
impenetrable armor. He might have married wherever he had willed,
but Society and her fair votaries sighed and smiled in vain, and finally
decided to leave him alone, to Verdayne's infinite relief.
As for the Boy, he was always, as I have said, a mystery, always a topic
for the consideration of the gossips. Every year since he was a little
fellow six years old he had come to Verdayne Place for the summer; at
first, accompanied by his nurse, Anna, and a silver-haired servant,
curiously named Dmitry. Later the nurse had ceased to be a necessity,
and the old servant had been replaced by Vasili, a younger, but no less
devoted attendant. As the Boy grew older, he had learned to hunt and
took long rides with his then youthful host across the wide stretch of
English country that made up the Verdayne estates and those of the
neighboring gentry. Often they cruised about in distant waters, for the
young fellow from his earliest years shared with the elder an absorbing
love of nature in all her varied and glorious forms; and in February,
always in February, Verdayne found time to steal away from England
for a brief visit to that far-off country in the south of Europe from
which the Boy came. Many remembered that Verdayne, like an uncle
of his, Lord Hubert Aldringham, had been much given to foreign travel

in his younger days and had made many friends and acquaintances
among the nobility and royalty of other lands, and although it was
strange, they thought it was not at all improbable that the lad was
connected with some one of those great families across the Channel.
As for Paul and the Boy, they knew not what people thought or said,
and cared still less. There was too strong a bond of camaraderie
between them to be disturbed by the murmurings of a wind that could
blow neither of them good or ill.
And the Boy was now twenty years of age.
Suddenly Paul Zalenska broke their long silence.
"Do you know, Uncle, I sometimes have a queer feeling of fear that my
father must have done something terrible in his life--something to make
strong men shrink and shudder at the thought--something--criminal! Oh,
I dare not think of that!" he went on hastily. "I dare not--I dare not! I
think the knowledge of it would drive me mad!"
His voice sank to a half-whisper and there was a note of horror in his
words.
"But, what a king he must have been!--what a miserable apology for all
that royalty should be by every law, human or divine! Why isn't his
name heralded over the length and breadth of the kingdom in paeans of
praise? Why isn't the whole world talking of his valor, his beneficence,
his statesmanship? What is a king created a king