“Oscar?” Czar said, almost feebly.

“The King. But of course he wasn’t a Norwegian, he was a Dane, and then when he gave up the crown in 1906, Haakon came in—another Dane—he had been Prince Charles of Denmark, as you know—–”

“Well, sure,” Bridie gasped.

“—and his wife, Queen Maud, was English, the youngest daughter of Edward of England. By that time I had gone, and well out of it. I was to have married a Danish—–”

“—princess!” Bridie yelped.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” Czar said, slowly. “I don’t believe a damn lying word of this stuff. Ridiculous, you said. And ridiculous it is.”

Simply, Thor said, “My papers are in the bank box in Seattle. They’ve been there for years and years, since the day you and I met on the boat that brought us here. You can see them. I want you to.” Smiling, he turned to Bridie. “No, Bridie, my dear, she wasn’t a princess, though she’s a princess now, if she’s still alive, which I think she isn’t. A nice girl, I remember, though a shade dull, and rather long in the tooth.”

Bridie drew herself up, she seemed to gain inches in stature, she looked about her from heights not attainable by the herd.

“All these years,” she said, in a voice of awed wonder, “all these years here I’ve been a lady in waiting to royalty and didn’t know it.”

“I’m sorry to spoil your dream, Bridie, but that isn’t quite so. All the aunts and uncles and cousins would have had to be killed or removed before the political hand could fall upon me. I was hardly more than a boy—a student—but I always disliked form and ceremony and fuss—though there was little of it all at that democratic court. They’re more democratic, really, than we are here in the United States. I was proud of them in this last war. What courage, what dignity, when the country was occupied and over-run. I sometimes thought they might all be destroyed; and the cities. When I heard what the barbarians did to Holland. Well, I was out of it half a century before that. Every now and then some young rebel beats his wings against the golden bars. Usually it doesn’t turn out quite right. Take that young King of England—young enough, at least—when he rebelled. But it didn’t help. He only exchanged a golden prison for a shabby brass one.”

“If all this fairy-tale bunk is true, how is it they haven’t been after you all these years?”

“I wasn’t important enough. If I were to go back now, no one would remember me, or care.”

“That girl—what became of that girl you didn’t marry?” Bridie, the romantic.

“She married someone else, I once came on a magazine picture of her taken with the family. They all looked alike, those girls, but I recognized her, she hadn’t changed so much. An old lady, very thin and spare, she looked just as she used to, not even much older, though half a century had gone by. She sat straight as a stick in her good satin dress and her good rope of pearls and her long jaw and her nice eyes, as though some one had etched some wrinkles with a pencil on her face, the young severe girl in her strait jacket of court convention hadn’t changed, really.”