“Your—­sir!” he said.  “God save the Prince!”

“Yes,” Loristan answered, after a moment’s hesitation,—­“when he is found.”  And he went back to his table smiling his beautiful smile.

* * * * *

The wonder of silence in the deserted streets of a great city, after midnight has hushed all the roar and tumult to rest, is an almost unbelievable thing.  The stillness in the depths of a forest or on a mountain top is not so strange.  A few hours ago, the tumult was rushing past; in a few hours more, it will be rushing past again.

But now the street is a naked thing; a distant policeman’s tramp on the bare pavement has a hollow and almost fearsome sound.  It seemed especially so to Marco as he crossed the road.  Had it ever been so empty and deadly silent before?  Was it so every night?  Perhaps it was, when he was fast asleep on his lumpy mattress with the light from a street lamp streaming into the room.  He listened for the step of the policeman on night-watch, because he did not wish to be seen.  There was a jutting wall where he could stand in the shadow while the man passed.  A policeman would stop to look questioningly at a boy who walked up and down the pavement at half-past one in the morning.  Marco could wait until he had gone by, and then come out into the light and look up and down the road and the cross streets.

He heard his approaching footsteps in a few minutes, and was safely in the shadows before he could be seen.  When the policeman passed, he came out and walked slowly down the road, looking on each side, and now and then looking back.  At first no one was in sight.  Then a late hansom-cab came tinkling along.  But the people in it were returning from some festivity, and were laughing and talking, and noticed nothing but their own joking.  Then there was silence again, and for a long time, as it seemed to Marco, no one was to be seen.  It was not really so long as it appeared, because he was anxious.  Then a very early vegetable-wagon on the way from the country to Covent Garden Market came slowly lumbering by with its driver almost asleep on his piles of potatoes and cabbages.  After it had passed, there was stillness and emptiness once more, until the policeman showed himself again on his beat, and Marco slipped into the shadow of the wall as he had done before.

When he came out into the light, he had begun to hope that the time would not seem long to his father.  It had not really been long, he told himself, it had only seemed so.  But his father’s anxiousness would be greater than his own could be.  Loristan knew all that depended on the coming of this great man who sat side by side with a king in his carriage and talked to him as if he knew him well.

“It might be something which all Samavia is waiting to know—­at least all the Secret Party,” Marco thought.  “The Secret Party is Samavia,”—­he started at the sound of footsteps.  “Some one is coming!” he said.  “It is a man.”