he at first thought to be the dead body of a beautiful, boyish, young huntsman.  Some enemy had plainly attacked him from behind and believed he had killed him.  He was, however, not quite dead, and the shepherd dragged him into a cave where he himself often took refuge from storms with his flocks.  Since there was such riot and disorder in the city, he was afraid to speak of what he had found; and, by the time he discovered that he was harboring the prince, the king had already been killed, and an even worse man had taken possession of his throne, and ruled Samavia with a blood-stained, iron hand.  To the terrified and simple peasant the safest thing seemed to get the wounded youth out of the country before there was any chance of his being discovered and murdered outright, as he would surely be.  The cave in which he was hidden was not far from the frontier, and while he was still so weak that he was hardly conscious of what befell him, he was smuggled across it in a cart loaded with sheepskins, and left with some kind monks who did not know his rank or name.  The shepherd went back to his flocks and his mountains, and lived and died among them, always in terror of the changing rulers and their savage battles with each other.  The mountaineers said among themselves, as the generations succeeded each other, that the Lost Prince must have died young, because otherwise he would have come back to his country and tried to restore its good, bygone days.”

“Yes, he would have come,” Marco said.

“He would have come if he had seen that he could help his people,” Loristan answered, as if he were not reflecting on a story which was probably only a kind of legend.  “But he was very young, and Samavia was in the hands of the new dynasty, and filled with his enemies.  He could not have crossed the frontier without an army.  Still, I think he died young.”

[Illustration:  He was the man who had spoken to him in Samavian.]

It was of this story that Marco was thinking as he walked, and perhaps the thoughts that filled his mind expressed themselves in his face in some way which attracted attention.  As he was nearing Buckingham Palace, a distinguished-looking well-dressed man with clever eyes caught sight of him, and, after looking at him keenly, slackened his pace as he approached him from the opposite direction.  An observer might have thought he saw something which puzzled and surprised him.  Marco didn’t see him at all, and still moved forward, thinking of the shepherds and the prince.  The well-dressed man began to walk still more slowly.  When he was quite close to Marco, he stopped and spoke to him—­in the Samavian language.

“What is your name?” he asked.

Marco’s training from his earliest childhood had been an extraordinary thing.  His love for his father had made it simple and natural to him, and he had never questioned the reason for it.  As he had been taught to keep silence, he had been taught to control the expression of his face and the sound of his voice, and, above all, never to allow himself to look startled.  But for this he might have started at the extraordinary sound of the Samavian words suddenly uttered in a London street by an English gentleman.  He might even have answered the question in Samavian himself.  But he did not.  He courteously lifted his cap and replied in English: