THE Governor-General received Virginia in royal state. His manner was gracious and genial. He led her to a seat in his great library and closed the doors. The royal guard took his stand outside.

“I told you, Miss Holland,” he began eagerly, “that I had high ambitions. You see that I am a man of my word. Of course, the thing that happened was inevitable. It was written in the book of Fate. Had I not seized the reins—another would. Conditions made my coup possible. For the excesses of the Imperial Conquering Army I have no words in palliation. Such is war. Had I known the peril of your father and mother, I assure you I would have hurried to their rescue—you believe me when I say this?”

“I am sure of it, now,” she answered promptly.

“I hurried to Babylon the moment I learned that the defense had collapsed and our troops were victorious—”

He paused and leaned closer.

“I want to apologize for the unpardonable blunder I made the last time we met in this house. I did not realize then how deeply and madly I love you. In anguish I learned it too late. But I have bided my time. I have lived to prove my devotion in the hour of your peril and I have only begun what I wish to do for you—”

Again he paused, his eyes devouring her pensive beauty.

“I had rather win you than rule the Empire that’s mine. I would win as a man woos and wins the one woman he loves—you believe me when I say this?”

“Yes,” was the frank reply. “I believe now that you are in dead earnest.”

“Good. I don’t ask if you love me. I know that you do not. I do not ask you to marry me immediately. I know that I must first win your regard. I prize you all the more for this reason—”

“Man-like, of course,” Virginia interrupted with a smile.

“First, I wish to pay you personally the highest tribute a man in my position can give to any man or women. I am going to offer you the second highest place in the Empire next to mine. Your fortune has disappeared in the wreck of war. You shall rebuild it tenfold through the work I shall place in your hands. My first ambition now is really to pacify the mind of the States. It can be done through our women.

“I appeal to your reason. Here is the situation. The last hope of successful rebellion has been stamped out. The millions of America, completely disarmed, are helpless to resist our army of occupation. I wish, not only to complete the crushing of the last hope of insurrection; it is my ambition to convince the people that the central monarchical and aristocratic form of government is the only natural order of life and therefore a divine law.

“The quick intuitions of women have been always more open to this truth than the more brutal and anarchistic male mind. Women have always been the bulwark of aristocracy and imperial monarchy. Man is an anarchist—woman a royalist by instinct.

“The American democracy was only an accident of time and space. The oceans are now the King’s highway and he owns them by right of eminent domain. Democracy can never survive this bringing of the ends of the earth together. Democracy cannot live because when brought face to face with the monarchical form it is not worthy to live. The United States of America gave the human race the one supreme example of a weak, corrupt and contemptible government. The like of it was never known before in the history of man.

“Democracy is a disease—a form of crowd egomania which drives millions of people mad with the insane delusion that they have been called of God to do something for which they are utterly unfitted.

“All government worthy of the name must be conducted by a few brilliant minds—divine leaders—presided over by a supreme leader whom we call emperor or king. This is true in so-called democracies. The people only pretend to govern—imagine that they govern. They do not. A few master minds and brutal wills do it for them. Hence the system of bosses whose foul record we have ended forever.

“No nation can have an art or literature unless monarchical and aristocratic—America has never had a literature. It will have one only when its conscious life is reincarnated in the soul of a sovereign who takes his crown from God, not man.

“The people of this country were never fit to govern themselves. They got the kind of government they deserved. In Central Europe government has long been reduced to............