"No! By Jove!" said Paul's father. "Hubert is away, you know, and I have just let the thing slide--"
"About the end of February did you notice the boy looking at all worried?"
Sir Charles thought a moment.
"Yes--I recollect--d--d worried and restless--and he is again now."
"Ah! I thought so!" said Mark Grigsby, as though he could say a good deal more.
"Well, then--out with it, Grig," Sir Charles said impatiently.
And Captain Grigsby proceeded in his own style to weave together a chain of coincidences which had struck him, until this final certainty. They were a clear set of arguments, and Paul's father was convinced, too.
"You see, Tompson told you in the beginning she was Russian," Captain Grigsby said after talking for some time, "and the rest was easy to find out. We're not here to judge the morals of the affair, Charles; you and I can only be thundering glad your grandson will sit on that throne all right."
He had read in one paper--he proceeded to say--that a most difficult political situation had been avoided by the birth of this child, as there was no possible heir at all, and immense complications would ensue upon the death of the present ruler--the scurrilous rag even gave a résumé of this ruler's dissolute life, and a broad hint that the child could in no case be his; but, as they pithily remarked, this added to the little prince's welcome in Ministerial circles, where the lady was greatly beloved and revered, and the King had only been put upon his tottering throne, and kept there, by the fact of being her husband. The paper added, the King had taken the chief part in the rejoicings over the heir, so there was nothing to be said. There were hints also of his mad fits of debauchery and drunkenness, and a suppressed tale of how in one of them he had strangled a keeper, and had often threatened the Queen's life. Her brother, however, was with her now, and would see Russian supremacy was not upset.
"Husband seems a likely character to hobnob with, don't he, Charles? No wonder she turned her eye on Paul, eh?" Mark Grigsby ended with.
But Sir Charles answered not, his thoughts were full of his son.
All the forces of nature and emotion seemed to be drawing him away from peaceful England towards a hornets' nest, and he--his father--would be powerless to prevent it.