CHAPTER XII.
A SECRET AND A THUNDERBOLT.
President Jardine was dead.
Low lay the head, and still the form of the man of whom flatterers had often spoken as the uncrowned King—an Oliver the Second, the Cromwell of the Twentieth Century. His, indeed, had been the power symbolised by the ancient Crown, the Sceptre, and the Orb. The vanished majesty of great dynasties—the Normans, the Plantaganets, the Tudors, the Stuarts, and the House of Hanover—had but paved the way for the practical rule of this man of the people. Even yet, it is true, the jealousy of political parties had preserved—none knew for how long—the title of King for a descendant of Queen Victoria. But a grudging socialistic democracy had left the legitimate monarch little more than the dignity of an august pensioner. The King
