"What it has also shown, sire, is that no protection is enough.
When I, who love the lad, and would - when I could sleep, and let
him get away, as I did - "

"The truth is," said the King, "we are both of us getting old."
He tapped with his gnarled fingers on the blanket that lay over
his knees. "The truth is also," he observed a moment later,
"that the boy has very few pleasures. He is alone a great deal."

General Mettlich raised his shaggy head. Many years of wearing a
soldier's cap had not injured his heavy gray hair. He had
bristling eyebrows, white new, and a short, fighting mustache.
When he was irritated, or disagreed with any one, his eyebrows
came down and the mustache went up.

Many years of association with his king had given him the right
to talk to him as man to man. They even quarreled now and then.
It was a brave man who would quarrel with old Ferdinand II.

So now his eyebrows came down and his mustache went up. "How -
alone, sire?"

"You do not regard that bigoted Englishwoman as a companion, do
you?"

"He is attached to her."

"I'm damned if I know why," observed the old King. "She doesn't
appear to have a single human quality."